Page 35 of Green City Wars

She has the bee gun in her hands and looks murderous, but murderous is really just the way her body language goes when she’s not trying to be charming. Resting killer face, really, as is appropriate for one of the last pure-predator enforcer Strains that still gets geneware support. The guards from the Farm Projects, the warrior elite of the Country Clubs. Mean, basically. Mean from nature and bred to be meaner, and right now she’s locking eyes with Skotch and doesn’t intend to let him just walk away.

She’s tense as a garotte wire but her aim doesn’t waver. She steps closer so he can hear her over the alarm and general hullaballoo. Practically in reach if he lunged, but he reckons stoat reflexes can pull a trigger faster than a poor raccoon can leap.

“No more innocent act, Herr Skotch,” she tells him. “I know you have him.”

And he wants to do the innocent, he does. Up on the scaffold, the teeth below him, he managed it with admirable sangfroid. His adrenaline system is overclocked past all tolerance, though, teaming up with the nerve-jangling cocktail of sounds and the lack of Plangent finally to wrestle his self-control to the ground. He gives her a mad grin that suggests that, yes, maybe he’s been stringing them all along, all this time. But if it’s true then he’s not going to tell her or anyone. She can wear his hide as a cloak before she’ll get it out of him.

Seeing her fury is a last tiny joy he can squeeze out of this otherwise unsatisfactory situation. Fury not even at being wrong, but at being right and still being outmanoeuvred. Her composure cracks and for a moment she’s not an engineered predator with a gun, but just an enraged mustelid with teeth.

He goes for her. It’s his window, the moment the gun drifts from him in her shaking hands. He’s bigger, he’s stronger, he’s got the drop on her. If he can get his teeth into her throat he’ll show her just whose branch of Carnivora is best.

She’s gone when he gets claws and teeth into that serpentine space she occupied just a moment before. Her own teeth tear at his arm but don’t lock on. Instead she puts distance between them because she’s got the gun full of bees and he doesn’t.

He has just one moment to sincerely regret his life choices when the shooting comes to play a surprise inspection to this particular part of the battlefield. Surprise, because it’s not Szerky pulling the trigger. Her body jerks aside so savagely he thinks she’s taken a pellet, but instead she’s weasel-dancing around the incoming attack, throwing her long form into mad contortions so that the shot passes through the gaps between her loops.

“Skotch!” shouts a voice. He’s already backpedalling away because hopefully Szerky’s gun doesn’t have much range on it.

It’s Maria. She’s got a popgun, a good one, air battery for two or three shots before it needs recharging. Ramming another pellet into the breech and bringing the weapon up again. Trying to draw a bead on Szerky as the stoatweasel leaps around, a sinuous blur.

“Go!” Maria snaps through her jagged mess of teeth. And possums always look mad but right now she’s practically rabid. And Skotch doesn’t know if she came here with orders to rescue him. What he does guess, though, is that she reckons Szerky got Fitch back at Skotch’s place. She’s not after justice, but she’ll take revenge for her partner if she can get it.

Watching Szerky close the distance like a lightning bolt clad in ermine, he reckons Maria’s going to be crap out of luck. Right now, though, it’s not his fight. He doesn’t even have a fight. What he has, ideally, is an escape.

He bolts. Leaves Maria his absolute best wishes as she snaps off another shot. Skotch has his own pelt to look after right now, and it’s already collected a couple of bald patches.

He vaults over a crow lying on its back with its feet in the air like it’s in a cartoon. A Gray comes at him, pointing a gun that turns out not to be loaded or tensioned, or for some other reason doesn’t go off. Skotch scoops up the dead bird and knocks the squirrel flat with it. Disrespectful both to the deceased and to religion in general, but he reckons he’ll take the bad karma if it gets him out in one piece. Then something hits him from the side—not a shot but a solid body. A squirrel, clinging to him, trying to get its incisors into his neck. He rolls over fighting to dislodge the tenacious rodent. It’s Ripper, he realises. Ripper, who presumably took the bulk of the Country Club haul for this piece of off-the-books service, and who stays bought once she’s paid for.

He gets a hand on her leg and drags her off his back with what feels like quite a lot of fur and skin he’d rather have kept. For a moment they’re rolling over and over, spitting, scratching, biting. Him bigger, her faster and just generally madder. Just insanely furious that Skotch, whom she never liked ever, is in danger of escaping with the miserable dog-end that passes for his life.

With a convulsive thrash he throws her off. She almost goes into the teeth of another separator, and this time he’s not going to suddenly turn merciful at the last minute. His blood’s up, his cognitive functioning’s down, and he’s just a spitting hairball of rage. And it’s his cue to run, honestly, as Ripper scrabbles to keep from losing her tail to the mechanical jaws, but all the flight’s been punched out of him.

“You killed Sly,” he spits. His mouth is full of saliva. The words come out thick and choked.

“Who?” Ripper looks like some invisible hand is squeezing her, teeth all bared, eyes virtually popping from her head with rage. The Gehirner engineering colliding with animal instinct at full speed, resulting in a kind of berserk fury, the state no animal wants to get to, but sometimes you just have to roll with the punches and come up swinging. “The fox?” she spits. “Who cares about some cripple fox?”

He goes for her. Hits her hard enough that the pair of them actually bounce clear over the separator. Her teeth go into his shoulder like knives, and then she’s got an actual knife scraping coldly down his ribs. Skotch takes her and shakes her, slams her against the metal of the floor. A crow blunders into them, all flailing wings and sharp beak. Skotch kicks the bird, then just swings Ripper at it, lamping the blundering corvid across the back like Ripper’s the stick he’s got to beat the world with. Then Ripper’s blade worries across his fingers and he loses his grip on her. She rolls, lands splay-limbed. There’s a gun.

A popgun, there between them. They both freeze, looking at it. In his fired-up state Skotch probably couldn’t even pull a trigger, but he recognises it as a weapon he doesn’t want his enemy to have. He lunges for it, practically jaws first.

She’s quicker. Gets it in her hands and pointed the right way, the ring of the barrel right into the concavity of his body as he folds round her. He feels the vibration as the trigger pulls. Ripper’s shrill cry of triumph.

It’s not charged. Nothing happens. Skotch gets a hand about her throat. He’s about to end the whole business here and now. Then a knot of fighting squirrels, red and gray, boil into the pair of them. Ripper is gone from his grasp and Skotch ends up on his belly, shaking his head, feeling a half-dozen points of pain where he’s been bitten and cut. Suddenly his instincts are fighting back the red tide of rage and telling him he’s hurt and this is a good place to be out of. All that fight alchemised to flight the moment he gets a breathing space.

Shuddering, the back of his brain yammering with panic, he tries to get a sense of the fight’s choreography. Plenty of Reds and Grays popping off at one another still. Plenty of bodies, a bumper restocking day at the Separation Plant. Szerky.

All the way across the factory floor from him. A dead squirrel at her feet and so messed up he can’t tell which side it’s from. Her mad stoat eyes find him even as he finds her. No sign of what happened to Maria.

There’s a lot of ground to cover between them, and some of it is grinding mechanical teeth and other parts of it are a thoroughfare for popgun fire, but Szerky isn’t going to let that kind of trivia stop her. She bunches, ready to go for him, and Skotch flees.

Tries to flee, anyway. His usual disadvantage, when amongst squirrels: He’s the biggest target in the room. A pellet strikes sparks from the floor to his left, making him jink right. He scrabbles round the blood-slippery rim of a separator, nails raking for purchase against the metal, for a moment that cartoon character whose legs are cycling like mad but who doesn’t actually go anywhere. Behind him, out of sight, Szerky is knifing through the melee in his direction.

He goes, getting his feet under him at last, streaking across the room and just ignoring the whole risk-of-being-shot thing because he can’t exactly dodge between the bullets like Szerky apparently can. Just relying on the general odds that his body and a speeding bolt won’t ever quite be in the same point in space at the same time.

And somehow she loses him. He doesn’t see how. Maybe Maria, coming back for more because you don’t ever assume a possum’s dead just because it’s down. Somehow, rather than the factory floor stretching out forever ahead of him like a bad dream, his feet spill him into a pipe-cluttered wallspace. Not exactly a happy thought, knowing what’s carried through those pipes, but at least it’s shorter on guns than the place he was in before.

Just one gun, in fact. A yipping voice barking out his name. He bunches, crouched, turning. Knowing he should run but knowing he’ll take the hit if he does. Instead he does literally the worst thing against a popgun, which is make himself look big, the perfect target. It’s instinct, though, the raccoon standing tall on its hind legs, arms out and fur bristling as though he was facing some dog dumb enough to be intimidated by the display.

Ripper has her popgun loaded now, levelled at him. Just as his mad rage has washed away, so has hers. She’s cold and level on the far side of the gun.