Page 12 of Green City Wars

He can be no other. Cutting a straight course through all that blood and thunder, almost under the badger’s stomping feet. A mouse in a trailing brown coat, clutching a satchel. When he casts a panicked look back at Skotch, his eyes are behind goggles, making him weirdly buglike, alien. Doctor Meece, I presume.

Skotch sets off after him but he’s not the only hunter who’s done his homework. Halfway across the floor, the whip of the rodent’s tail still beyond his claws, and Szerky’s there.

She comes from above, from who knows where, from the nightmares of any small mammal evolved to hide in a burrow when the predators come calling. The impact bowls Meece over. He goes onto his back, forepaws still locked about the satchel, but kicking fiercely at her with his hindfeet. She bares her teeth, pinkish eyes pinning him. Skotch—still running—thinks she’s going to bite his throat out, but Szerky is a familiar of the Country Club, a civilized weasel. She pulls out a long blade, polished and treated wood, lacquered sharp as glass and hard as metal. Her orders are not Skotch’s. No “Bring ’em back alive” for her.

A random squirrel saves Meece from immediate evisceration. Just some Gray, blundering in, seeing a stoatweasel who wasn’t on the muster rolls and taking her for an enemy. Which she is, just not of him in particular. The squirrel goes for her with his own blade, and Szerky brings out something from her super. It’s a gun, Skotch sees. Not the popgun theatrics of the two armies, but something squat and nasty. It makes a high whining sound as it fires, and the squirrel goes down. Not clean down, but twitching and spasming, the impact point visibly swelling with anaphylactic shock. Nasty little toy, some Country Club speciality. Skotch has never seen one before.

He has the option of letting her take her prey, but he canvasses his feet and finds out he’s still running. Because he wants to know, and if she puts a shot into Meece nobody will ever tell old Skotch just what the hell it was all about. A second later all he’d be able to do, other than keep running, would be to uselessly—probably fatally—screech to a halt right in front of her. So he kicks a little extra surge of speed from his legs and barrels her right off the top of Meece. Rolling over and over, trying to get a grip on her like he’s trying to grab a snake or a live electric wire. Skotch never thinks of himself as a bruiser, but he’s one of the biggest Gehirner on the field bar the badger. Szerky is longer but he outweighs her, and there’s a fightiness to raccoons when you force them into it. A remnant of that evolutionary nexus they share with bears.

He has her then, pins her, tries to get his teeth to the nape of her neck because that’s the moment the fight goes out of most Gehirner. Stronger, for sure, the big burly raccoon, but predators always have an edge in this kind of scuffle. It’s in the blood, deep enough you can’t engineer it out even if you wanted to.

A moment later she’s just out of his hands like smoke, coiling back from him, leaving blood on one arm where her teeth worried at him. She’s dropped the gun but sidewinds backwards and picks it up.

“Herr Skotch,” she tells him. “You were warned.”

Skotch didn’t notice Springer turn up. He is willing to bet neither did Szerky. The Graycoat quartermaster has her popgun levelled. Doesn’t know who Szerky is, but knows Skotch just enough to have her step in. Doesn’t hesitate, either. Little squirrel finger already on the trigger and no time wasted with challenges.

Skotch will swear, later, that Szerky wasn’t even aware of Springer until after the shot was fired, and yet the stoatweasel whips her long body out of the way even as the pellet is crossing the minute distance between the mouth of the barrel and the weasel-sized space she was occupying. The shot barely clips the outward bristling points of her fur, and then she is returning the favour, the bulbous little gun spitting one, two, three.

Skotch has her knife, the wood one, that’s probably a month of Plangent ampoules to the right buyer. Instead of selling it to some collector he brings it down across the gun hard enough that the blade’s lacquer coating cracks, and the gun explodes. Explodes, as it happens, into bees. The inner workings, revealed like a smashed fruit, show a spiral of little chambers, a miniature living hive. A gun that shoots bees. Some weaponsmith on the farms has way too much time on their hands.

Szerky flails backwards because, when they’re not coming out of a gun, the bees don’t really have much friend-or-foe functionality. Skotch undergoes an equal and opposite reaction to the insect problem everyone’s just inherited, and falls over Springer.

She’s dying. He can tell that immediately. The gun shucked the stingers out of the bees, complete with muscular venom gland, before expelling the dying bodies like so many spent cartridges. Springer took three stings deep in her narrow torso. The allergic reaction is already sending her tissues into a frenzy of overcompensation, splitting her skin down the lines of her scars as she bloats up. Her eyes stare helplessly into Skotch’s. She fights for breath through a neck already bulked out as thick as her thighs. And probably a reprobate raccoon isn’t who she wants to see, as her final company in this world, but at least somebody’s there for her.

Then she’s gone, and Skotch is looking round. The fighting’s rolling his way, and stray shot scars the tiles—something for the kitchen staff to puzzle over come morning. Szerky is on the wrong side of a great rushing tide of avenging Reds, furiously trying to get round. Which must mean …

Skotch sees Meece fleeing the other way, having very correctly identified the stoatweasel as the biggest threat. Skotch is, for once, on the right side of the trouble, a clear field if he can only catch the damn rodent up.

He tries to call out as he runs after Meece. Tries to say something about only wanting to get the mouse out and safe. His own blood’s up, though, and overcharged adrenaline makes most Gehirner lose the finer points of speech. Plus it’s not exactly honest. He’s hired to get Meece to Uzco, and if it turns out that Benson just wants a mouse to snack on, that’s outside Skotch’s contract. And so, in the end, he gets as far as the mouse’s name, and just runs.

One look back, wild, panicked, the goggles askew. Still that satchel in his arms, and without its weight he’d have been gone a long time ago. The coat that flails and whips about his heels and tail is one of those garments that can button up into overalls, protective gear, lab gear. More bad thoughts.

It’s the damned parrot, in the end. Why is there even a parrot, in Neuwien? Because the city’s exemplar, old moribund Vienna, has had invasive parrot colonies for decades. Exactly the sort of clever, opportunistic, and fairly aggressive species to find a way to exploit human construction once the temperate zone’s been considerately warmed for them. They turned up in the Grunstadts, like they do, and now there’s a whole district which is basically semi-feral, semi-genehacked parrots, where the regular armies and guilds and little powers of the city fear to tread.

The parrot soars down from counter level and does its best to snatch up Meece from the tiles. Except parrots aren’t raptorial birds, particularly, and mouse-plus-satchel exceeds the laden flight capacity of one parrot. The end result is that the bird becomes Meece’s hang-glider, the pair of them coasting, wobbling wildly, across the kitchen at squirrel-head height, banking sharply from the occasional shot or brandished knife. Meece isn’t cooperating, either, which makes the parrot’s life even more difficult. Fine by Skotch. He just runs doggedly in pursuit and hopes nobody shoots him.

The parrot-and-mouse combination finally comes down in a tangle of feathers and tail amongst a small group of animals at the kitchen periphery. Not squirrels, or not majority squirrels. Some rats, some pigeons, a toad. They have cloth about them. Neckerchiefs, mostly. Ragged and red—not the rusty orange of the Redcoats, but actual bright scarlet. The shade maybe let them get in through the door, posing as mercs aiding the Redcoat Reconquista, but they’re not. Skotch recognises the livery.

Making the same mistake about colours, a handful of Grays take that moment to try and drive them off. One of the pigeons performs a remarkably acrobatic backflip and, at the appropriate point, uses its momentum to lob something from its claws. The little device lands close enough to the Grays that when it blows, the shrapnel cuts across them. No fatalities but bloodied muzzles and fur. The anarchists—that’s what they are, actual animal anarchists—have Meece then, and that was plainly what they were here for. They bundle him out of the kitchen and the Grays don’t care enough to pursue.

Skotch does. He’s dumb that way. He bundles through the little service door right after, and runs into the barrel of a gun.

The toad with the gun is steady. Short arms, the butt of the weapon braced against one warty knee for stability. Great big eyes that have Skotch’s number.

“Scram, Herr Bandit,” the toad says. Retreats, but keeps the gun on him down a long corridor the others have already got clear of. By the time Skotch isn’t being held at gunpoint by an amphibian, the gang of them, and Meece, are long gone.

PART

TWOMADPARROT ALLEY

6OUR LADY OF BREAKING RULE ONE

Back at his nook, Skotch takes stock. And it has to be back at his nook because, after Meece made his exit—or was forcibly exited, no way of knowing—things were getting a bit hot, chez Franz-Ferdinand. And Springer was dead.

Skotch has had plenty of time to think of that, going back down the hard way, back to the root levels where the Gehirner mostly live. And it’s not like he and Springer were Best Friends Forever. And friendship is a tricky thing, anyway, for the Little Helpers. The engineered part of them, that drags them far enough towards the human to be useful to humans, makes room for it. The innate part of them that existed beforehand isn’t so accommodating. You have kin, basically. There’s a place in Skotch’s head for family. Mate, kits. There’s a broader and less-welcoming space for conspecifics. Then there are other categories that include Prey, Predator, Not Predator But Dangerous, Irrelevant, that kind of thing. And also Oddity, because his species is curious and investigative by nature.

But the engineering is like a hook into the low ceilings of those spaces in his head, lifting them up, making room. So that, over the course of a protracted association, animals of other species can end up slotting into those categories where they wouldn’t normally belong. He can know a squirrel, for example, and when that squirrel gets gunned down by a stoat he feels it. It plucks the same string a lost mate would, or offspring gone down the gullet of an owl. Not as keenly, but interacting with the same neural and hormonal architecture.