Ymir, page 17
The grendel notices it, too. Its body splits and pivots, the whole upper half rotating to zero in on the distant ansible. The pulse comes again, a nocturnal flower blooming and withering, a giant’s eye opening and closing. The grendel rears up on two spindly stilts. It shudders, contorts, cilia telescoping to tendrils that wave in the wind.
Yorick thinks of the ballad, the grotesques dancing around the bonfire.
“You’re with me,” a clanner says, and this time it’s finally Thello’s voice. Yorick memorizes the specifics of his brother’s mantle as well as he can. It has a splash of white on the shoulder, a handprint. From the size of it, Fen’s, who wanted to be here on the ice in spirit while she sets fires in the Cut.
Yorick doesn’t speak—no need to speak, no need to risk tipping Thello off with a ragged breath—but he follows his brother to the sleds. There are three of them, machine beasts stripped down to their skeletons for speed and fitted with oversized engine cowls for silence. One is already crewed, a pair of armed clanners hanging behind their driver. The other two are still being fueled and deiced. The chemical spray forms a steaming fog.
When Thello gives him the nod, he climbs into the bucket. His brother clambers up behind him. The non who gave Yorick his surface gear, who didn’t believe he was Yorick the Butcher, walks a circle around the machine. They make some final adjustment to the cowl, casually sweep a fringe of icicles off the sled’s front. They crank the fuel port shut.
Another pulse from the ansible, and this time it illuminates a flock of security drones. They’re streaming away from their usual hunting grounds, heading for the Polar Six instead. Thello’s goggled face turns to track their exodus.
The non swings nimbly into the driver’s spot. The grendel boards last, folding itself against the back of the vehicle. Two sleds are already hurtling off into Ymir’s gullet; now their own vibrates to life. There is no insulation to soften its vicious rattling. Yorick grunts, doubles over, and just before they leap away across the ice, he realizes the trip is going to shake his gelfleshed wound apart.
He mutes his mandible.
CHAPTER 46
They’re running dark. The handful of animals that evolved in this lightless icescape navigate mostly by sonar; skids and sleds are equipped to do the same. They fly across the hardpack like a trio of shades, and Yorick tries to imagine himself bodiless, to project himself into the rushing nothing. His body is a bad place to be.
The vibration of the engine feels like white-hot tongs prying at his belly; every dip or swerve of the sled widens them. He has to lean forward, press himself into his forearm, to keep it at bay. If Thello sees, he will think he’s hunching into the wind. Yorick clamps his artificial teeth to his old ones and waits for it to end.
The sled in front banks, throwing up snow spray. The wake whips over them, battering his face, polygonal flakes turned a pale radioactive green by his goggles. Their driver banks to follow. Yorick can’t see their destination approaching. Can’t feel it, either. The dull dread-and-nausea is masked by the sharper kind from his fraying wound.
But the exterior ring of the ansible must be close. If they hurtle past the invisible boundary line, they will only have a few moments to regret it before the autocannons go off, and his bloody work with the shard and microtool will have meant nothing. He gauges distance in his head, guesses at their speed. He feels a bubbling relief when the sled decelerates.
They come to a halt thirty meters from a pair of frostskimmers. Yorick remembers the herd he saw on his way north. These two are nearly ready to spore; aside from the bulbous embryo pouch both are spindly, emaciated. The membranous sails that carry them across the ice are rotting off. They’re sniffing at something in the snow.
One lowers its blunt head, and its fading phosphorescence illuminates a spattered dark parabola. The third skimmer is half a skimmer: its rear limbs are intact, splayed crookedly on the hardpack, but everything beyond its jointed middle is a mass of shredded meat. Tendrils of steam are still rising from the carcass.
It marks the boundary line as well as any hazard holo. Its butcher is just beyond, a glossy black autocannon that looks vaguely organic, almost elegant. Yorick knows it’s one of many. The autocannons sprout from the snow all around the ansible’s exterior, a fairy ring of brutal deterrent. Thello must know that, too.
“Stay there,” his brother says, and Yorick can detect an undertow of excitement in his voice, the faint echo of a child’s anticipation. It reminds him of the night they crept to the company fountain, one of those small perfect moments that in the end meant nothing at all.
Diverting half the security drones is worthless if they can’t creep across the boundary line, so Thello must have some plan, hopefully one that doesn’t smash Yorick’s own to splinters. His brother climbs off the sled, and the grendel follows him. Yorick stays, and concentrates on breathing. The inside of his thermal suit is slick and sodden. He pictures a trickle of blood mixing with his sweat.
Their driver cranes forward, inspecting the dead skimmer. The other two have spooked off. “Should have learned by now to not follow the blue light,” the non says. “Dead right before it was bent to spore. Sad thing.”
Yorick doesn’t see how it makes any fucking difference. He will never spore, either. But the driver turns, like they want him to answer, and they catch him with his hand splayed to his abdomen. Their eyes are hidden by their goggles, but Yorick imagines a flicker of suspicion. He keeps his hand where it is. Acts as if it’s a casual placement, not an attempt to hold his organs in.
“Thinking on the gutjack,” the non says. “Good. Keep that bare in mind.” They lean forward and thump Yorick in the belly. “Mortality moves on us all, doesn’t it, Butcher?”
Yorick doesn’t process the words. He’s distracted by the supernova. The agony’s so bad that for a moment he thinks the gutjack has detonated, somehow triggered by the driver’s half-curled fist. The muted mandible muffles his howl, but his vision swims, goes black. He wills himself still. He forces himself to inhale.
He slips sideways out of the bucket and crashes to the snow. The driver’s noise of surprise comes distant, through a foamy roar. Bodies move over him. Hands yank his mantle open, then his nerve suit. Ymir’s breath is merciful for the first time he can remember. It numbs his wound. Nearly quenches it.
“He cut it right out himself. Fucking—”
“Nah, no. Still in. Still see it on the screen, on the scan.”
He briefly hallucinates. The ice becomes a bartop, and the gloved hands inspecting his patchwork gut become Linka’s telescoping arms. She sterilized them in her strongest vat, and now she is going to put him back together. She is a human operator. Human operator. Human operator.
“Tried to cut it right out himself, didn’t fucking say anything, should—”
“Blow it now. Blow it here, and leave him with the skimmer.”
Yorick sees Thello standing over him, recognizes him by the white handprint. He can picture the expression under his brother’s hood. It’s the same one their mother had when she stared down at Yorick during a beating. Dispassionate, disconnected from any false bonds.
“What did you do, Yorick?” Thello demands, dropping to a crouch. The question hangs in the cold air between them, brittle. “Tell me. Quickly. What did you do?”
Yorick’s head is so fractured he tells his brother the truth. Luckily, his mandible is still muted. He undoes that with his tongue and tells a half-truth instead. “Nearly got it out,” he rasps. “I fucked up. Had to stop. Teledocs, they make it look easy.”
Thello gives an angry twitch, shaking off an unseen insect. “Couldn’t just sit in the fucking bubblefab.” He turns and somehow grabs a tablet from the air. “Gutjack’s still active,” he says. “Still responding.”
Thello’s eyes slide away. Yorick follows them to the grendel, a slow-shifting shape squatting by one of the sleds. Its full attention is on the ansible again. Its cilia are straining toward it, magnetized. There will be no rust-red filament to influence his brother’s decision. Yorick doesn’t know if that helps or hurts him.
“We’ll need his tattoo,” Thello says, voice flat. “He has to be alive for it. We give him a shot and keep going.”
There are no murmurs. No dissent. Thello has earned these clanners somehow, even without Fen here to loom and snarl. Soft-stomached Thello. It makes Yorick strangely furious, adds another sort of fuel to his conflagration. The fury matches the agony.
Then the agony ends, ushered away by the jab of an injector, and he promises some drug-dazed god that he will never disparage company phedrine again. Someone adds a fresh layer of gelflesh to his exposed stomach, finishes it with a numbing spray that gets mostly sucked away by the wind. They start sealing his thermal suit back up.
He could probably do it himself, but he doesn’t want to. He wants to lie in the phedrine puddle forever, staring up at Ymir’s starless sky, insulated against everything that hurts. But the bliss is fleeting. By the time his mantle is back on, the pain has returned as a dulled but persistent throb. He uses it like a war drum, pretends it’s urging him to his feet.
When he straightens up, he is face-to-face with Dam Gausta. And another of her. And another.
CHAPTER 47
Thello always was a clever imp. Gausta would be proud, or at least amused, to see what he’s devised here: holomask feed from her stored conversations with Fen and Yorick, spliced and smoothed to create ten blinking, scowling incarnations. Autocannons are indiscriminate, but Gausta is paranoid. The clanners have found a blind spot where her face is concerned.
Thello checked each holomask himself and gave out a final hit of neuroleptics. Now they approach the boundary line at a crawl, sleds throttled down to ensure the autocannon has a clear view of their many luminous faces. Yorick wonders how many times they have tested the exploit, if any of the frostskimmers that wander across the boundary do it wearing holomasks.
The bisected carcass lolls slightly in their wake, animated by the engine-churned snow. Yorick sees a similar shudder go through their driver’s back. But they pass the blood spatter without adding to it. The autocannon swivels. Stutters. Yorick imagines it trying to clear its carbon-shelled head.
Normally a simple machine like this would kick the anomaly up to the company algorithm, or at least shuttle it sideways to its fellow sentinels, to decide by aggregate how to treat a silver-eyed crowd of company higher-ups. But today, with the Cut in chaos and the Polar Six under attack, a glitching autocannon is low priority.
They slide past, and Yorick counts the meters. Tries to remember the range. When the driver’s shoulder blades slump, a small implosion of relief, he assumes they’ve left it. There’s still a scatter of security drones somewhere up above them, but the sleds are small targets running dark. Their cobbled-together chassis give off no signals.
Nothing but ice between them and the ansible now. Yorick knows the human crew there is minimal—even with high-grade damper drugs, the company has to rotate its troops through. If they have a grendel behind them, and Yorick in front of them to open doors with his tattoo, nine clanners with blockguns and hunting rifles might be enough.
Thello thinks so. Yorick can feel his brother’s leg jumping and knocking against the side of the sled, the same tic he had before jigs. For a moment it syncopates with the throb in his belly. He thinks again of the prisoner sprinting, slip-sliding, their mad run through the camp perimeter. They probably felt the same way Thello feels now.
The holomasks come off. The sleds pick up speed again, three magnetic grains skittering across Ymir’s surface, drawn inexorably to the ansible. Invisible rails. Everything is on invisible rails. They slalom the occasional drift, snow swept up into small dunes by invisible hands. Yorick’s incision throbs.
For the miners or clanners who swallowed gutjacks during Subjugation, they were a brutal deterrent. For the company, they had an extra utility: sometimes gutjacks belonging to algorithm-selected prisoners would glitch, allowing escape so long as a twitch-fingered recruit didn’t interrupt. Then the gutjacks’ dormant geotags, frequencies relegated to a tiny sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum, would wake up and start whispering.
Yorick had to wake his manually. It was a long, bloody hour with the microtool.
Their driver’s head turns. Yorick tracks, peering through the veil of snow. In the distance, off to the south, he sees the running lights of a company flyer. It’s heading for the Polar Six Mine, carrying the squad Gausta requisitioned from the garrison in Sants or Shipfall, ready to help him hunt down a handful of drone operators.
His gutjack seems to shiver, whispering a language nobody has used for years, one nobody would listen for. Not unless Yorick told them to.
“There is no one for whom it is well,” he says, knowing the wind will strip it away before it reaches Thello’s ears.
They hurtle on toward the ansible. It’s massive now, the size of some folktale frostswimmer or extinct leviathan erupting from the ice to breathe. Yorick ignores its brain-bending geometry, watches the sky. He wishes he could watch Thello, too.
A dozen black boluses plunge from nowhere and detonate the snow around them. Ionized air shivers through Yorick’s mandible, licks his skin with static. It rips the heart out of the sled engine. The vehicle jolts, shudders. Yorick barely feels the motion tug at his gelflesh. He’s wiping his goggles clear, already anticipating the next act, the follow-up to the emps.
Their driver twists at the frozen throttle, begging and then bargaining with it as they carve out a stop. The other sleds are dead, too, one stalled out on their right, the other somewhere behind them.
“Fuck,” the non says. “Fuck, fuck. Thello?”
Thello doesn’t have an answer. The company flyer banks hard, drawing a jagged circle in the umber. Then the security drones that have been coalescing overhead, running dark, drop down in a furious swarm. Yorick is the black hole that draws them in.
CHAPTER 48
The drones’ first salvo fells most of the clanners; the driver is one of them. Yorick watches shock rounds batter their hunched back. Impact alone knocks them halfway off the sled, then the rounds flatten and activate, clinging like limpets, and convulsions send the non the rest of the way down into the snow. They’re safer there.
They’re not important. Yorick twists around, ignoring the sear of torsion, to find Thello. He needs his brother to know it was him. He needs to look him in the eye. But Thello is already off the sled, crouched at the engine cowl.
The grendel is with him. Its hide is almost bubbling, tongues of xenocarbon curling outward, coronal plasma from a seething sun. Agitated by the emp, or maybe by its assault on the ansible coming apart so quickly and completely.
Yorick feels a small savage pleasure in that, but the grendel is tertiary. He hauls himself off the sled and lands badly. Pain finds new pathways, somehow shooting from his abdomen to tear through his hip and thigh. Two clanners who dove clear of the first salvo are firing back, blockguns chattering, reverberating in Yorick’s skull.
It feels like Subjugation days. He leans into the pain and levers up to his knees. Thello is busy, back turned, prying at a panel on the engine cowl. The grendel shields him, enveloping him like a bizarre exoskel. Thello’s goggles are pulled down, and there’s a filament wriggling into the corner of his eye, between the frost-licked lashes. Yorick feels a crackle and roar in his chest.
The pair move in perfect sync; Thello frees the panel and the grendel drives its tendrils inside. A meatier tendril, more a tentacle, snaps from the back of its body to scythe down a drone that dips too close. The sled engine’s fried circuitry hums and sparks.
Yorick knows they’re trying to escape the firefight, but that’s not why he hurls himself at them. In the moment, all he wants in the entire fucking universe is to sever that filament between them, send the grendel back to its black box and Thello back to his flesh one, stop them fucking talking, because you don’t talk to grendels, you kill them—
They see him coming and the grendel flicks him away; right before the xenocarbon club smashes him off his feet Yorick is reminded of his mother’s backhand, brutal and casual. He lies gasping in the snow. Ymir spins around him, nearly dumps him off.
Thello will trigger the gutjack now. Yorick wasn’t able to disable the detonator. Didn’t even dare to try. He will die staring up at a sky with no stars.
A sky full of company drones that for some reason, maybe the collapsing neurons in Yorick’s brain, are beginning to cannibalize each other. He watches one turn on the murmuration, spitting shock rounds at its neighbors instead of the scrambling clanners below. Traitor. The other drones will never forgive its trespass.
Yorick shakes his head clear just as the sled roars back to life. Thello is in the driver’s spot now; the grendel’s still wrapped around him, shrugging off the shock rounds—there’s a reason they give Yorick radioactive ammo and nanocarbon fléchettes. Gausta probably thinks she’s doing him a favor using nonlethals, making sure he doesn’t die in a hail of friendly fire.
She doesn’t realize he’s already dead. Already a flickering ghost at a wake. Thello doesn’t need to blow the gutjack, doesn’t care either way. The emptiness is worse than hate.
The sled lurches forward. Because he is already dead, Yorick rolls across the churned-up snow and throws a hand against the metal skirting. He grips hard. The glove’s microspines activate. Thello twists the throttle, and they slam off across the ice.
CHAPTER 49
Yorick’s shoulder wrenches from its socket, a soft wet pop hidden by the roar of the sled. Even filtered through the earports in his hood, the engine sound is skull-pulping—the grendel didn’t get the muffler rig back online. He is deaf, and mostly blind from the snow spray battering his face. He scrabbles his feet for purchase, bouncing off the hardpack, off the side of the sled.
