Page 19 of Green City Wars

“Chief,” Skotch says, “I don’t even own a shooter.” Because gun doesn’t quite cover the various contraptions Gehirner have constructed to fill the gap in their natural arsenal, and Skotch hadn’t taken the time for a forensic look over his conspecific’s corpse.

“Have done, though, haven’t you,” Benson rumbles from the base of his throat. “Maybe you do again. Territorial little bastard, aren’t you. Find another raccoon going through your stuff, you get jumpy.”

Skotch is rubbing his hands over and over, that old ingrained behaviour. Stress brings it on like he’s burlesquing Herod. Maria and another couple of possums are right behind him, and they do have guns. Just spikers, but bigger and better-made pieces than Eddi and his crowd were packing. Enough to put some inconvenient holes all the way through him. Under pressure, he does what his nature always prompts him to do, finds a different line to push back on. “You going to tell me just why he was doing that?”

“Word said you’d got the mouse,” Maria says from behind, jabbing him with a spiker. And Skotch, having been jabbed and threatened with a number of ersatz firearms in the last couple of days, rounds on her—on all three of them—showing his teeth, standing up, looming. Maria snarls right back at him—nothing snarls like a possum. The other two scrabble back, which is the exact wrong thing when you’ve got a weapon with an accurate range of only four inches max. For a moment Skotch is going to go for Maria’s gun, get his bigger hands over it and shake her off it. And then he’d be in the clench of Uzco’s fist, with their regional manager, and a weapon, and that would be lines crossed that nobody could go back on. And Benson’s tank doesn’t have a turret but that doesn’t mean the old reptile hasn’t built some ordnance into the thing.

And he reckons he reads something into Maria’s furious defiance. That part of the engineered Gehirner brain where the base animal concept of kin is stretched to cover colleague, guild, all the wider associations and circles they’re made to move in. That part which was jabbing at him after Springer died. Maria’s lost a friend, basically, and she cares, and she’s fighting mad over it. He can respect that.

“There’s a lot of that about,” he tells the room. “I don’t have him. I’m on his trail. Like you hired me. I’ve got leads to follow up. I’m on the case, chief. I almost got him at Ferdinand’s but a…” Stoat, except raising the slender spectre of Szerky here would be as good as calling Benson a liar over who Uzco is helping out, because it sure as hell isn’t the farms. “War got in the way. But I’m on it. You hire this raccoon, he does the job.”

Benson scrabbles at the side of his bowl, hooks a claw over the rim, cranes his wrinkled neck over. Surprising amount of binocular vision, in a snapping turtle. The sign of something that’s evolved to strike swift and sudden despite all the cold-bloodedness. And needless to say, the tank has a heater, so Benson’s mind and metabolism are working at 100 percent efficiency 100 percent of the time. Sharp guy, that turtle. Enough to read mammal body language, every hair and bristle of it.

“Skotch, this is big business,” the turtle says ponderously.

“Yeah,” Skotch says, understatement of the century, “I get that. Big enough that Fitch got himself killed over it. And I didn’t do it but I’d sure as hell love to hear who you thought did, that being so. I mean, come on, chief. You hired me for this, so you don’t think I’m some dumb animal. If you could just let me into what this Meece’s deal is then maybe it means I make some right move down the line that gets him to you.” For the love of Jeff will someone tell me what’s going on? Skotch feels like every damn beast in the green city has had a detailed dossier on the truth of what makes Meece so damn dangerous, and he’s the only one who somehow missed checking his mail. Just left guessing.

A ponderous silence, then. Ponderous because it’s Benson’s silence. Maria isn’t saying anything either, but she’s got nothing to say. Just a good obedient owner of an Uzco collar, doing what she’s told. But the turtle knows. The knowledge is heavy in him as the rim of his plastron scraps against the side of his tank. For just a moment Skotch thinks he’s going to spill.

The old turtle closes his eyes and nostrils for a moment, shutting a chunk of the world out. “The mouse,” he says heavily, “is dangerous. The mouse being in this city is bad news, Skotch. That’s what you need to know. That mouse doesn’t find a trap soon … chaos, panic.” He lifts his plated head, eyes still closed. “One damn mouse, can you believe? A single maus worth of gelt, and all this trouble.”

“So who was it got Fitch?”

“There’s trouble in the world, there’s always someone wants to own it.” Benson’s withered eyelids slide apart again, the regular two and the transparent third. “You know, those who aren’t part of the guilds and service companies. Who don’t just help make the city work. Armies, parasites. Freelancers.” The baleful reptile stare on Skotch again. Putting him in his place: useful but only because the world’s such a broken, twisty place. “You bring that mouse in alive, that’s good. But I’ll take delivery of him dead and still pay you. More than enough to afford the mausgelt on him.”

“Well, fine, sure,” Skotch says vaguely. “Thanks for untying my hands, chief.” Hands which are still washing one another, over and over. Skotch has no intention of turning assassin for Uzco, especially given that the market seems so crowded right at the moment, but it seems politic not to parade his scruples just now.

“Also I reckon you need a partner, Skotch. Given how dangerous the world just got for raccoons,” Benson says.

“No, chief. There’s a reason I left—”

But Benson and his tank just roll over that. “Maria can go with you. Keep your hide free of holes. Keep you on the straight and narrow. She won’t get in the way. You lead, she follows. Just a few discreet steps behind, right?”

“Come on, chief. I need to go places where an Uzco collar won’t win me any friends.”

“She’ll take it off for the duration.”

Maria twitches at that, doesn’t like the idea, but she’s an obedient enough wage-slave that she’ll pretend not to be if that’s what her paymasters tell her.

“You’ll barely know she’s there, Skotch,” Benson assures him. “Like your shadow.” Except Skotch’s shadow doesn’t make the back of his neck itch and doesn’t carry a spiker. And doesn’t, maybe, still blame him for Fitch being dead.

When he departs the tower of Das Uzcogebäude though, there’s a possum-shaped shadow skulking along behind him. And he wants to go to Sly, to find out whatever the hell has the old fox so spooked, but he sure as hell doesn’t want to share that tidbit with Maria. Instead, he goes to his nook, now free of bodies. Uzco has cleaned up after its own, and has added one raccoon’s worth of mausgelt to the ledger as it tries to find someone to pin the death on. After which it’ll decide whether to do things in the open, take the thirty-seven maus of compensation, or else get medieval on the other party, who hasn’t, after all, fessed up to the deed.

In the nook there’s a note, though. A corner of some human piece of paper, ripped out of a book. An inherently transgressive and destructive act, bordering on violating Rule One. Come to the Saint tomorrow. We’re ready.

The Mauler anarchists—the ones who actually have the mouse, if Skotch has any grasp at all on what’s going on—want to talk. And Skotch doesn’t want to share that with Maria either, but he doesn’t reckon they’re a patient crowd, so he’d be wise not to keep them waiting.

Of course Maria wants to know what he’s about, the next morning. Simultaneously she wants to stay in the background in case he’s being watched. Or maybe she fondly thinks she’s so inherently stealthy that he’ll forget that his pelt now comes with an extra tail. The fork of that particular dilemma keeps her out of Skotch’s hair until he’s almost at the Chapel, way across town. He rides most of the way there. The walk to where Saint Frances hands out the benedictions cuts through the turfs of a dozen different guilds and a hundred tiny parasite polities. Rattenkönig gangs, Jeffist sects, Separatist churches, and just random packs of thrown-together Gehirner. His ride pierces the thorny political landscape: an automated mini-train shuttling human-required goods around, part of a great silver spiderweb buried beneath Neuwien. Engines in darkness, powered by photoelectricity from the great green above. Not intended for Gehirner use, but the animals figured it out as an energy efficient way to cross the distances within the city. Official and unofficial business mean a lot of animals have a need to get from outskirts to civic centre and back, and so the little goods wagons have become the standard safe way for just about any beast to take the weight from their four feet.

Maria must read in his stance that he’s about to hit his stop, because she scrabbles over the cardboard of the packing crates to put her snaggle teeth in Skotch’s face.

“I get it,” he says, waving her breath away. “You’re watching. Benson’s faithful sentinel, vigilant until death, sure.”

“I haven’t forgotten Fitch,” she tells him.

“Again with this?” Wondering if he can get her in some conversational bind that will see him continuing on foot and her still trying to think up an argument on the train. It seems unlikely. “You want to get your gelt out of that business, you’re watching the wrong animal.”

“You’re deep in it,” she snarls at him. “I keep watching you, you’ll take me right to them. Or else they get you and I tell Benson he’s got a second dead body on his hands.” She’s vibrating with rage, not rage at him especially but there’s nobody else here. Like raccoons, possums aren’t the most stable Strain. A long way removed from the rest of the mammal stock, so a lot of the tweaks don’t quite take properly. Skotch heard they update possum-ware on a weekly basis and it still doesn’t fix the bugs.