CHAPTER 01
Yorick wakes up dead, which is never comfortable. His chest is a clamp, lungs frozen, no heartbeat. His limbs are phantom. The hindbrain panic swallows him whole. He knows nothing except that he is alone and terrified and in the dark; every sensory-starved nerve in his body is screaming it, and then—
A jolt of electricity digs its teeth in, and his heart stutters back into motion. He owns his chest muscles again, so he sucks down a breath, ballooning all the crumpled alveoli in his lungs. The first one always feels like sucking back broken glass. A rehearsed thought comes to him: Nothing is wrong. You’re coming out of torpor. Nothing is wrong. You’re coming out of torpor.
He gasps. Bucks. Waits for the firestorm in his nervous system to subside, for the world to stop lurching from side to side. He works on proprioception, finding his body in space. His arms and legs are spread-eagled, punctured in a dozen places by tubes that are pumping him full of newly brewed blood. A diagnostic droid is scuttling up and down his torso.
His prosthetic mandible is missing. Cold dry air rasps in his wound.
“Welcome back from the River Styx, Yorick.”
Yorick’s eyes are crusted over. He works his lids until he manages to free one from the gound. First he sees only a dark gray haze. Next he sees an orange blur, flickering through his field of vision too quickly to track. He knows from experience that this is the orange suit of a thaw technician.
“It’s been a long time since we spoke last,” the voice says. “Nearly two decades here. Half that for you, I believe, with all the time spent in torpor. I can see you’ve done good work in that span. Eight successful hunts. Do they ever permit you to keep trophies from them?”
Yorick knows the voice. His gut coils tight.
“I still think you did your very best work right here with me, of course,” the voice continues. “Back in those early days of Subjugation.”
The tattoo on his neck prickles. He knows the voice, but it was one he never thought he would hear again, and if he’s hearing it again it means—
“I’m afraid this thaw’s not taking place on Munin. You were rerouted in transit to solve a more pressing problem here on Ymir.”
No.
No, no, fucking no.
“That seems to have spiked your adrenals, Yorick. Thrilled to be home, I expect.”
Memories crash in. Phosphorescent flares lighting up the ice field, the skull-pulping sound of smart mines going off. An anonymous body shredded to pieces, steaming, another barely intact, wriggling through the snow and slicking blood behind. And the owner of the voice is there, too, one bony hand on his shoulder, saying civilization costs.
“I’m an administrator here now,” Gausta says, voice sintered with faint surprise, as if she’s still marveling at the fact. “Living just to the east of your old haunts, overseeing security for all of Ymir’s northern-hemisphere extraction and refinery sites. Which brings us to why you’re here.”
Yorick wants to rage, to beg, to say that he will go anywhere, absolutely anywhere. Just not Ymir, the slushball of piss on the edge of the colony maps, the birthplace he swore to never set foot on again. But he can’t speak without his mandible. He only manages an animal groan that startles the thaw technician.
“Eight days ago a xenotech incident suspended all labor in the Polar Seven Mine,” Gausta continues. “There were grendels here after all, and we finally dug far enough to wake one up.”
Yorick isn’t afraid of the grendel. He’s killed the grendel a dozen times on a dozen worlds; it’s the job the company trained him for. He’s afraid of everything else.
“It butchered a few miners and then disappeared, as a grendel is wont to do,” Gausta says. “But the attack has reinvigorated anti-company sentiment here in the north. There are rumors of a strike. Fainter rumors of insurrection. We tread on thin ice.”
Yorick finally pries his other eye open. The orange blob of the technician sharpens. Above it, he sees the hazy outline of a holo projected on a low plaster ceiling. He can’t make out Dam Gausta’s features, but he recognizes the predatory angles of her body. He remembers her in a chamsuit, her long limbs dissolving into the ashy snow behind her, her hooded head turning dark as the starless sky. Before that, in a bright yellow coat.
“The algorithm balked when I chose you for this job, Yorick,” Gausta says. “You were only the third-nearest option, and the differential in transit cost was significant.”
Yorick forces the memories down and works on focusing his eyes. Gausta’s face comes clear, the wolfish gaze and jutting bones and swirled vitiligo skin. She’s aged less than he has in twice the years, as perfect and awful as ever, the gengineered telomeres of a company higher-up at work. Her eyes are unchanged, the same silvery pits.
“But machine minds are so limited when it comes to sociohistorical context.” Gausta gives her scalpel smile. “You understand this place, Yorick. Every day the mine remains shut and the grendel roams free, not only does the company bleed profit, but the locals’ discontent festers. Stability degrades.”
But it will never be stable up here; Yorick wants to scream it at her. The first colonists to come to Ymir were exiles and radicals. The generations born after were shaped by the cold and the dark into paranoid tribalists. He left because he didn’t want to die, and now the company has returned him with a tattoo on his neck, a target on his back.
Gausta reads his ruined face, or more likely his jolting heartbeat. “It’s been twenty years here,” she says. “And you’ve undergone quite a spectacular rendering of flesh. Nobody will recognize you, Yorick. So long as you do your work quickly, and tread lightly on the ice.”
CHAPTER 02
Gausta leaves, but her avatar lingers to give Yorick logistics:
He will have one day to recover from torpor before he conducts his initial investigation of the site, accompanied by the Polar Seven’s interim overseer. His pseudonym will be Oxo Bellica, to avoid Yorick Metu’s lingering notoriety. His hunting equipment was not transferred, but will be reprinted pending ansible clearance. His clothing and mandible are nearly finished. He is three hours out from Reconciliation.
That last part jags him, but explains why the world has not stopped lurching from side to side. They loaded him straight from his bowlship onto the only passenger skid that heads north. Nobody in the north would ever call it Reconciliation, of course. It’s the Cut to them, was the Cut before the company ever arrived.
Unless things have changed in the past twenty years—Yorick considers that faint possibility as the thaw technician retracts the tubes, freeing him from his plastic web. They’re gentle with the flap of scar tissue and reconstructed flesh where his jaw should be.
“I can give you one more wake-up shot,” they say, muffled by their mask. “Nod if you want it.”
Yorick has been working mostly on clenching and unclenching his toes, wriggling his fingers, but he manages to bob his head up and down. Microneedles prick his neck, and a half second later he feels a chemical cloudburst, stimulants flooding his whole body. It rubs his nerves raw and makes him momentarily want to vomit.
The bed folds, easing him upright, and the diagnostic droid crawls off him.
“You ready to try walking?” the technician asks.
Yorick nods.
The technician nods at a chugging printer at the end of the compartment. “We’ll go to that printer. Get you your clothes and your prosthesis.”
Yorick grunts. He draws a deep breath, rubs the knotted muscles in his thighs. He holds the thaw technician’s shoulder as he takes his first shaky step, timing it to the sway of the skid. He takes a second. A third. On the fourth his knees buckle, his head rushes, and he nearly takes the technician to the floor with him.
“Today’s not going to be pleasant for you,” they mutter. “Thawing you this fast, yanking you straight off the freighter without calibrating your chemicals.”
Yorick shrugs his bony shoulders, gives the technician his own hideous version of a smile. He was not expecting a pleasant day anyway.
They stand him in front of the printer nozzle, just long enough for a patchy gray undersuit of spiderwool, then help him into his high-collared coat. The color is wrong, black instead of canary yellow, but it fits the same on every world. The boots are heated this time. He puts them on while he watches the printer work. It disgorges his rucksack next, a fabric shell that scuttles along on four stubby pneumatic limbs.
“Your prosthesis should be inside,” the technician says. “Do you want my help with it?”
Yorick shakes his head, because attaching the mandible is something he does himself, alone.
“Okay.” The technician scratches under their mask. “I’m getting off at Sants. I recommend you stay in here and rest. You’re going to be sleepsick for a while. Fatigue, nausea, some body dissociation. Probably hit the peak in four or five hours.” Their eyes flick to the tattoo on Yorick’s neck, then away. “But you can do whatever you like. Your vitals cleared threshold.”
A door dilates at the back of the compartment, and Yorick catches a brief glimpse of rocking corridor as the technician departs. He smells a whiff of dust and machine oil. Then he is alone with himself. He needs to rectify that quickly, so he rubs his thumb and pinkie together to beckon the rucksack.
It ambles over to him, sliding slightly with the motion of the skid, and peels open to display the exact same things as always. This is a comfort to him. Whatever world he wakes up on, the small orderly one inside the rucksack is unchanged. Basic black tablet. Coiled neurocable. Disinfectant brush. Microneedle injector. Rolls of gelflesh.
His mandible is in a slab of clear putty, still warm from the printer. He worms his hand past it, to the bottom of the rucksack, and finds the drug canisters. Immunosuppressors for his wound, phedrine for his mood—neutered company stuff, of course, not street-grade. But right now, even company phedrine will do.
He loads his injector with trembly fingers. When the microneedles punch through his capillaries it feels almost like sunshine. It’s the closest he will get to it on Ymir.
CHAPTER 03
Yorick watches through the window as the skid churns along, throwing up a shroud of shattered ice in their wake. The sky is a black hole, all traces of starshine concealed by dense cloud. The only illumination comes from the skid’s running lights, a sickly green glow, the bioluminescence of some eyeless creature gliding along the primordial seafloor.
They’ve already passed the cities, passed the graveyard of one-way ships that brought Ymir’s first settlers and are still being digested for salvage a century later. They’ve passed the petrified forests and the airfarms that replaced them. This far north, the entire world is a single sheet of wind-scoured ice.
Yorick spots a herd of frostskimmers in the distance, leaping and gliding, attracted by the light of the skid. He observes them for a moment, then lets his phedrine high pull him farther along the swaying corridor. He hardly even minds that he is on Ymir, that he is heading north, that he is going to die there. His whole body is full of warm helium. He has the mandible tucked up under one armpit. His vague goal is finding the lavatory pod, where he will attach it.
The skid was noisy earlier, echoing with drunken shouts and laughter, a crowd of miners and a few fat-hunters swilling foamy bacterial beer in the corridor. Yorick kept his coat zipped to hide his lower face as he passed them by, but nobody glanced, too preoccupied by a wager: a tall bulky offworlder with an eye implant had bet they could contort themselves to fit in a standard-size sleepstack, claimed they were all cartilage, nephew, skeletal mod.
Now the corridor is dark, lumes dimmed by consensus, and half the skid’s passengers have shelved themselves into the miniature mausoleum to rest, not to win wagers. Yorick suspects they are trying to sync for the same work rotation. He keeps his footfalls soft, trying to outquiet the rucksack padding silently behind him.
There’s another window before the lavatory pod, and through it Yorick sees the one interruption to Ymir’s cold horizon. It grows in the distance, a warped mound erupting from the ice, sheathed in nanocarbon scaffolding and coated in buzzing drones. As always, it’s difficult to judge the size of it. Even veiled in human tech, the original architecture of the ansible has a disorientating effect. Workers take a certain depressant drug to mitigate it.
A memory flashes through Yorick’s head, neural sheet lightning: trekking out to the ansible when he was fourteen, maybe fifteen, clambering over the blockade, seeing who could creep closest before the nausea and the brain-bend were too much to handle. He remembers the alien structure as an enormous face, carved from black rock, sutured with eerie blue lights.
It’s the ansible that drew the first colonists here, the ansible that marks Ymir as one of the Oldies’ abandoned worlds. The company took it over during Subjugation, and Yorick doubts anyone clambers over the blockade anymore. Not if they want to keep their skulls intact.
He feels unease trickle, icy, through his phedrine high. Partly for the memories, which he knows will only get worse the longer he’s here. Partly because passing the ansible means they are barely an hour from the Cut. He knows this journey, this skid north, from what he thought was his very last day on Ymir. That day ended very badly.
Someone is puking in the lavatory pod. Muted sounds, throat and splash. Yorick’s shrunken stomach gives a sympathetic ripple. He goes the other way, finds a vacant sleepstack. He peels down his coat just long enough for it to scan his company tattoo, then climbs inside.
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