Ymir, page 20
Hyena emerges—confused, half drowned—from the neural flurry. It howls along. Shock rounds are still slamming into the grendel, latching where they can, ravenous lampreys. One of its serrated limbs scrapes up and down its own hide, cutting them away. The sound shivers through Yorick’s mandible and screams in his real teeth.
The rounds are replaced faster than the grendel can shed them. All seven squadmates have sight lines now, and Yorick is the anchor keeping their target in one place. The grendel reshuffles its body, compacts itself. Then a popping sound, and suddenly he’s pulling nothing. Momentum sprawls him again. His skull bounces off the floor.
When he comes up, glove welded to an abandoned spar of flesh and xenocarbon, he sees the grendel fleeing. Its body has streamlined to a single pseudopod, and it moves like some demented spring, end over end. Yorick feels a laugh crawling up his throat, but it doesn’t emerge. He unlocks the glove and gets to his feet. Gathers himself. Staggers forward to join the pack.
The grendel has given up its meatshield, and the squadmates circle and backpedal to make sure it doesn’t find another. Shock rounds become shredders. Yorick can hear the giggling. They pen the grendel in and disassemble it with scalpel-tight bursts. Every limb it churns out becomes a stump. It scuttles one way, then the other, slowing.
As it collapses to the shifting floor of the cave, Yorick feels almost ashamed, which means the hyena is wearing off. The grendel is only a grendel in the end. But before the final gust of razor-rain, the one to finish off its half-exposed reactor, the squad leader raises her fist. The carbines go silent.
“Still functioning,” she says, with a no-longer-cherubic smile. “Incapacitated. Good.”
Four squadmates stay with the grendel, scopes up. Two go back to the bubblefabs to check on the prisoners, maybe turn down the shock rounds and give them a hydration pack. One goes to Shammet’s corpse and starts spraying it down with membrane for transport.
Yorick does nothing. Hyena is dead. Maybe the grendel’s filament poisoned it somehow when it hotwired his neurons. He crouches on the cave floor, head down, eyes shut. Pain starts filtering back in. His skull throbs countertempo with his shoulder. His patchwork belly is pressed against a running engine, slowly heating up.
Behind his eyes, he sees bodies. The clanner he shredded by accident. The miner whose throat he slit open in the jig. The prisoners twitching in the back of the flyer. The mangled grendel in the cave, mangled Thello in the snow.
Yorick opens his eyes and stares at the receding floor instead. He hunts for his sizzling hate. He hunts for his satisfaction, his triumph, his anticipation for the torpor pool. They all elude him, scurrying off into dark corners.
A minute later the squadmate called Piro joins him, squatting down to put an arm around his back. They rub gently at Yorick’s exhausted flesh, careful of the shoulder, no doubt minding the injury notifications in their reactivated hood.
“Did it speak to you, then?” Piro asks. “With the little worm?”
“Sort of,” Yorick says.
Piro’s head swivels toward the quivering grendel, then they tap a finger against one goggled eye. “Nim, she thinks that’s why it wanted our hoods off. So it could get in our brains.” They pause. “What did it feel like?”
Yorick gets another sheet-lightning flash of the two children stumbling down the icy dune. The grendel’s imitation of Thello’s voice, droning and sobbing. Piro’s hand keeps moving up and down, up and down, on his bent back. It doesn’t belong there anymore, or Yorick doesn’t belong under it. Hyena is decomposing in the dirt.
“Bad,” Yorick says. “It feels bad.”
Piro nods, like they expected as much. Their hand drifts away.
CHAPTER 55
They put the grendel in a box—a dull gray faraday cube, no internal sensors for it to hack and jack—and shuttle it up to the surface. Gausta’s other troops are waiting there, done with their warwork at the Polar Six. Yorick feels no trace of pheromone affection for them. He watches them load the grendel, then the two new twitching prisoners, then finally the two membrane bags.
Both are a red mess; both are handled with a casual precision. Hyena doesn’t care for corpses. Yorick can only tell his dead clanner from Shammet by the heavy snow boots, somehow untouched by gore. He stares at them for a little while, the way he stared at the dissolving bodies in Laska’s Cradle, then boards his own skid.
He goes back to the Cut and back to the clinic, back to his miniature world of medroids and drug dispensers. The journey is a blur. Gausta’s avatar whispers to him about prisoner processing, riots quelled, necessary things. The teledoc welcomes him with phedrine and then resumes its work, reopening him to regrow the torn fascia it only patched over in the back of the flyer.
He sleeps through the hyena comedown, avoids the ugly morning, but he pays a different price. More dreams, bad ones. The neural aftermath of the grendel’s filament plumbing cracks in his gray matter. All of them involve the needlegun.
When he wakes up to Dam Gausta’s beautiful mottled face, he has a nonsensical bone-deep fear that he has only just been thawed, just been sent north, that everything was a holoplay he will have to perform all over again.
“It must have been a very strange reunion,” Gausta says. “Between you and your brother.”
Yorick feels no jolt of surprise. Thello’s deception was never going to stay intact.
“Was it his clever grendel that scrubbed his real face from the company net?” she asks. “Or was it you, Yorick?”
Yorick works his mandible, unstiffens his silicone tongue. “Does it matter?”
“It’s a personal curiosity,” Gausta says. “You’ve been impressive here. Your dalliances are small in comparison to the destabilizing catastrophe you preempted.” Her silver eyes are guileless, wide. “In the end, you did what was necessary. I’m pleased for you. Perhaps proud of you, though I can take no credit for innate capacities.”
“When’s the bowlship?” Yorick asks.
“Tomorrow morning,” Gausta says. “A freighter, carrying zinc to Munin. You’ve earned your rest, obviously.”
Yorick tries to feel the stasis fluid on his skin already, surrounding him, submerging him, but his other question bobs him to the surface. “The prisoners? The ones from the ansible?”
A hook tugs the edge of Gausta’s perfect lips. “Interrogations are under way,” she says. “I may do a few myself. They’re being held at a temporary site while we scour the Cut—scour Reconciliation, rather—for the final few conspirators. My briefly tenured overseer chief among them. She’s quite skilled at hiding for such an enormous individual.”
“What about Thello?” Yorick asks. “His leg?”
Gausta blinks, a minute flicker of annoyance. “I was hoping you’d severed the last tendrils of that parasitic fraternal attachment,” she says, “when you sliced open your own abdomen to sabotage the gutjack he placed there.”
Yorick sees the gutjack bristling in Thello’s palm. He sees the medicine capsule tumbling into the snow, chiral molecule coiled inside.
“He nearly finished the job, didn’t he?” Gausta asks, stroking her jaw. “Yet you ask after his leg.”
Splintered dreams churn with Yorick’s memories now: the concrete stoop becomes the lip of a torpor pool, the needlegun becomes a grendel’s serrated arm. He needs to get off Ymir. He needs to get off Ymir and never come back.
“I’m more interested by the red,” Gausta says, eyes gleaming. “Fen. She looks the part of a fearsome revolutionary, doesn’t she? Her youth and physicality will make the debodying all the more poignant. All the more potent.”
The teledoc on the ceiling is hideous now, sinister. Yorick shuts his eyes and prepares his last question. “Are you well, Dam Gausta?”
A small pause. He can picture the small crease on her forehead. “There is no one for whom it is well,” she says, completing the verbal loop, the one that assures them both they are speaking in privacy. “Do you have something more for me, Yorick?”
Yorick opens his eyes. “All those times you visited me when I was in orbit. When I was having my face put back together. Were any of those really you?”
Gausta stares back at him. “Of course, Yorick. The company values you very highly, and so do I.”
Yorick considers it, considers two trembling quantum branches, truth or lie. He realizes some things can be true and not matter at all.
“Then don’t bring me back here,” he says. “Don’t you ever fucking bring me back here.”
Gausta slowly nods. “I understand your sentiment completely,” she says. “It’s such an ugly place.” She pauses. “Your bowlship launches early tomorrow. I’ve assigned you protection for the intervening hours, as your weapons have already been recycled. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
Yorick realizes there is. “I want its arm,” he says.
Gausta blinks.
“In the cave, during the raid, I tore its arm off,” Yorick says, keeping his voice flat. “You asked if I ever keep trophies. I want the grendel’s arm.”
“How macabre,” Gausta says, amused. “I’ll see if it can be arranged.”
She dissolves away. Yorick exhales. He reaches without looking, finds the same company tablet he always finds, and pulls it onto his lap. He sees his reflection for a moment, haggard, red-eyed. His request for more pain-eater blinks through, accepted.
He sits back and waits to feel good. The teledoc is still above him, a frozen insect. He searches its body for the surgical saw, the one they use to debody prisoners, but doesn’t see it.
CHAPTER 56
Two drones are waiting for him when he finally emerges from the clinic, his pain-eater allotment exhausted, his body as whole as the company can make it. They dip to orbit him, stunners unsheathed and swiveling. Gausta’s protection is obviously not meant to be discreet.
It’s getting dark. The artificial sky is dusked down to a charcoal gray. The east end is still glitching. Yorick watches errant code drizzle through a gash in the firmament. He stares up at the drones, tapping one fingernail rhythmically against his freshly printed injector. The clinic sent him off with phedrine, but he’s craving something else.
“When’s curfew?” he asks.
The drones stare back, their carmine cams unblinking. One of them does a little loop in the air. They’re not equipped to talk, not even to blare company announcements.
He starts to walk, and his new friends fall in behind him. His vague destination is Southern Urbanite Memory. The umber streets are empty. Swatches of bioluminescence start appearing on the way, sleepy eyes blinking open. He thinks of the pulsing ansible, which in turn makes him think of the grendel, and of Thello, and the mudslide will begin if he doesn’t stop it now.
When he spots an autobrewer, he scans his neck and buys a glass jug of bacteria beer, the enormous kind that has to be drunk fast before the carbonation dies. Or drunk with other people, but Yorick has never liked that as much.
“Last night on Ymir,” he says, raising it in the drones’ direction.
They say nothing back.
Yorick names them Te and Vesper, after a pair of half-remembered fat-hunters from the last time he got shitfaced on Ymir. Then he starts that particular process all over again.
CHAPTER 57
The Cut becomes a different animal. The air turns cool, and thick as blood. Vapor-shrouded streets bare their neon skeletons. Yorick remembers when this place nearly belonged to him, and feels nearly happy for a moment. He refills the jug from another storefront nozzle. It’s paler this time, bitter. He gulps deep to savor the crackle and bloat in his gut.
Most shops are shuttered. He sees traces of the riot in fire-scarred walls, detritus scattered across the paving. Cleaner bots scuttle here and there, digesting chunks of plaster and shards of glass. He watches one choke down a sliver of broken window. The tinkle-crunch of the denaturing smartglass is oddly melodic.
One of the scrap shops is open, illuminated by an argon-splash sign. The drones follow him there. At the dilating door, he pauses.
“Wait here,” he tells drone-Te, or maybe drone-Vesper. “Need to grab something.”
He flows down the steps into a sea of jumbled components and circuitry, parts diverted from the recyclers. He starts combing the mess for what he needs. The beer buzz makes his motions feel more intentional and more important, more fated maybe. The pieces come to him, the way they always came to Thello.
He carries the scattered anatomy to an old woman with a shaved head. Her left arm is withered, encased in exoskel that was self-assembled, and she doesn’t look at him while she scans his tattoo. She wraps the components and spraybags them. Yorick drinks the last of the bitter beer and swills it around his mouth. The jug emptied too quickly.
He takes the bag in one hand and holds the glass jug in the other. He thinks he will feed it to the cleaner outside, to hear its shivering music, but when he steps out of the scrap shop the cleaners have all scurried away. The artificial sky is black.
Yorick heads for the hotel again. The drones bob along behind him like bad thoughts. Cowardice demands another drink, so he watches for another autobrewer. The walk is shorter than he remembers, though, and he finds the red girl on the next corner. She’s squatting stubbornly behind her rack of filter masks. The street is dead empty of customers.
Her blue eyes flit past him to the drones, and her scrawny body tenses. Yorick holds up the jug, corrects, holds up the bag. Components clack together inside it.
“For the jammer,” he says. He dredges a name out of the hazy sleepsick memory. “For Masha’s jammer.”
The girl stares at him.
“That supshop down the street,” he says, setting down the bag. “You can go in, eat whatever you want, get some to take away. I’ll pay it.”
Her stare shifts to his neck, where he is no longer bothering to hide the tattoo. Her lips twist. For a moment she looks just like Fen. “What do you got instead of blood?” she asks. “What’s the other half?”
Yorick sloshes the jug of bacteria beer. “You want a coat?” he asks. “Boots? I’ll pay the printer.”
“Half-blood,” the girl says, serrated, gleeful. “Half-blood, half-blood, half-blood.”
“What’s that mean?” He crouches down. “What the fuck does that mean?”
The girl recoils, eyeing his mandible. She clenches her jaw shut.
“I used to hunt scrap,” he says. “Fed it to the company recyclers. They fed us back. Got more food from them than I did from my mother.” He pushes the cold glass of the jug against his forehead. “You get food from your mother?”
Her glacial blue eyes barely flicker at the word.
Yorick knows he is ranting at a child, but the words keep spilling out. “People up here, they don’t care about their own. They care about deciding who’s not. It’s an ugly place. It’s so fucking ugly.”
“You’re fucking ugly,” the girl says, pumping bravado into her small voice.
He stands up and nudges the bag of parts toward her with his toe. “Just take it.”
“You’re fucking ugly,” the girl repeats.
Yorick wants, momentarily, to unhook his mandible and show her the ragged hole. But then he remembers she’s already seen it. She saw it the first day he staggered up the hotel steps. “I’ll open the tab for you in the supshop,” he says. “It’ll close tomorrow when I go offworld.” He hesitates, grimacing. He asks. “You know anyone with blue teeth?”
The girl looks at the drones again. Shrugs.
“Alright,” Yorick says. “Bye.”
“Bye,” she echoes.
CHAPTER 58
There’s a walking market ambling slow circles around Southern Urbanite Memory; Yorick catches it up and buys a small cold bottle of seed liquor. The beer was working too slowly, making him bloated and tender when what he needs is the hollowing out. He dulls the olfactories in his mandible and takes his first swallow.
It burns, but the burn softens everything else, starts to melt the wax. After his second swig he turns his olfactories back up, stops cheating. The taste is disgusting. He stands there drinking, sometimes sloshing it into the gutter, until the drones circling overhead seem less like pests, more like pets, sleek and friendly and clever.
The Cut becomes blurrily beautiful. Its neon and biolamps, its filthy alleys, its wood-faced inhabitants. When the walking market’s selection screen goes dark and he sees his own reflection, he’s beautiful, too. The shadows hide the trench of his glasgow grin, the hinge where mandible meets flesh, and they hide his half-blood eyes. He can imagine Nocti’s there instead, or his mother’s. He gets another bottle for the hotel room.
He sways over to the supshop, drawn to the smell of hot yellow grease. He doesn’t know how to open a tab only for small dirty children with orange hair, so he opens it for anyone who walks in, slivers off his anonymous block of company credit. He weaves in and out of the food stalls without speaking, and buys everything he wanted to buy as a child.
Smoked and spiced crickets, doughy pockets full of vatcheese and red sauce, greasy rinds, tubes of bright blue jelly. He finds steamed buns that smell almost as good as the ones Fen bought. He leaves the skimmer meat where it is.
There are company foods, too, things that are the same on every world, how phedrine is the same. He buys a packet of the sugared shells that a company man in a yellow coat used to sometimes hand out. He meanders back to the red girl’s corner to waft her the smells, remind her of the tab, but she’s gone. Spooked by the drones, or more likely by him.
But his body is filling slowly with helium, so it’s hard to feel bad about that. He floats up the hotel steps, leaves drone-Te and drone-Vesper to make friends with the sullen security guards outside. He floats past the dark doorway to Linka’s bar. He floats above all the shit in his head.
When the host droid skitters over to greet him, he doesn’t even ask about the lifts.
