Page 36 of Green City Wars

“Company raccoon,” she says. “Where’s your collar?”

“This again?” Skotch complains. “You’re an army squirrel? Your friends are back there getting murdered, Ripley. You want to pretend you’re here with a gun on me cos of orders? Or you care about the damn mouse? You don’t even know what’s going on here.”

“And you do?” she throws back and he almost gags on his frustration.

“I mean, I don’t!” he shouts at her. “But this whole circus is because all those dumbasses think I do! Go help your friends, Ripley. Go fight the Reds. Isn’t that your job?”

Right then she obviously thinks her job is loose raccoon disposal, because she doesn’t go anywhere. And he reckons that her general dumbassery didn’t extend to getting payment up front from the Country Clubs, and now she’s got absolutely nothing to justify to her superiors why she went and got a load of their soldiers killed. And not like a dead raccoon is going to level those scales, but it will obviously give her a huge amount of personal satisfaction.

“Just a shame you came out here, Skotch,” she tells him, because even with her finger on the trigger she wants him to hear the sound of her carping voice just a little longer. “Means I got to drag your dead weight all the way back in to the separators.”

He goes for her, or he tries to, but the hurts, the encroaching dumb, the threat of the gun, they conspire to fix him in place, compliant as you choose for the shooter who doesn’t want a challenge. Something comes down between them, though. Like a curtain. Feathers. A high voice telling “Ripper” Ripley that she can’t. “No, no! I need him! He owes me a story!”

Skotch hears the sharp clack of the popgun even as Lulu intrudes. Her voice is abruptly a shriek of pain, swatted out of the air by the force of the bolt. She collides with him, a meaty weight of pigeon enough to knock him down from his threat display. She’s flailing, keening, feet scrabbling at the air. Skotch shoves her off him, no time to be delicate. Comes up facing Ripper.

Her eyes are wide. She’s shot Lulu. The pigeon; the pet. Rule One. Rule One, which says, fight, squabble, politick, build, and thrive, but under no circumstances ever bring humans into the Gehirner world. Because all we are is theirs, and they can take it back.

The next shot snatches Ripper away, sends the Graycoat spinning off back towards the factory floor, knotted about the bolt. There are more Reds moving in. The first few just step past Skotch and the spasming Lulu, barely sparing them a glance as they hunt their territorial rivals. The second wave stop and stare, waiting for someone with authority. It’s an army and the Reds are big on chain of command.

Skotch claws over to Lulu: still alive, shivering, one wing flat out at an awkward angle.

“Hurts,” she gets out, all those words condensed to just one. And Sly’s dead, and Fitch and Springer, and now this. This ludicrous, irritating bird whom Skotch never wanted involved in any part of his life, except she was and now she’s shot.

He calls out to the Reds, demands a medic. They ignore him, soldiers who don’t take orders from some civilian. Some US civilian, surely closer to their enemies than to them. If they only knew …

Then there’s a squirrel standing over the pair of them. Or at least standing beside, because, on his hind feet, he’s not really much higher than either Skotch or Lulu are lying down. He wears a cuirass of buttons that rattle together when he moves, and his helm is a bottlecap, emblazoned with a little image of a cheery cartoon panda. His whiskers are curved like elaborate mustachios and, of all things, there’s a tiny gold-rimmed monocle somehow propped over one eye. He has a popgun in his hands. For a moment it looks like he’s going to just finish the pair of them and move on.

“Big stretchers,” he calls out, and the way the other Reds hop shows that this is the near-side terminus of the chain of command. “Get these two back to forward command. Maybe one of them can tell us what the devil is going on.”

And Skotch probably could have done, once, but he’s falling down the well of Plangent deprivation and right then feels he could barely get out his own name.

15RED-HANDED

He’s asking for a medic from the start. Not for himself but for Lulu. At first calling from his stretcher, hauled by four squirrels away from the Separation Plant, and never has he been happier to see something recede into the tangle of the green city’s underworkings. Then from his feet, because he’s bone-tired, muddle-headed, and cut up, but he can walk. The Redcoats stretchering him look mutinous about it for a second, but he’s a big raccoon and he’s saving them some grunt work.

Lulu isn’t walking out of here on her own two feet. Her bulk bows the slightly degraded plastic of the stretcher. One wing trails, obviously not going to be carrying her through the air any time soon. Perhaps ever. There’s a constant throaty sound in her breast that Skotch can parse as whimpering. Her eyes stare both sides of her and her feet claw and clutch. Her breast has gone red as a robin’s with lost blood.

“I’m here,” Skotch tells her, as though that’s ever comforted anyone. Then looks daggers at the squirrels who’ve been freed up from hauling him. “Get a medic, will you?”

Medicine for Gehirner is tricky. Nutrition is brought to them by the somewhat morbid repast of the SLG bars, to which Skotch just narrowly avoided making a contribution. There are little guilds who monitor Gehirner health across the city and code for medications whenever any sickness gets hold. Three times in his years in Neuwien, Skotch has scarfed down pills with his rations because some epidemic or other was being wrestled to the ropes. Health notices get posted up everywhere, and when the white doves and rats with the red markings start distributing pills, nobody gets in their way, as neutral and respected as their opposite numbers, the carrion birds of the Separation Plants. Except Skotch has some words to say about just how they use their neutrality.

Injury is tricky, though. There’s no safety net for something that lays you low but isn’t catching. Often it’s just age catching up with you, because the majority of Strains only have a few years, even with their operational lifespans increased by the engineering. From a human perspective there’s not much mileage in a big expensive rat hospital so that a washed-out old rodent can limp on another three weeks. Industrial accident is the other common cause of damage built into the system. The guilds look after their own,. They build what facilities they can within the walls of the city, and a fair body of knowledge about how various Strains are put together has accumulated, and gets shared city to city. Not quite a global network of hospitals urgently flying out mangled animals to this or that specialist unit, but they’re getting there. The Little Helpers have only been a thing for a few decades after all.

Amongst the armies, and at various other strata of the Gehirner world, the most common cause of injury is precisely this, though: violence. The Reds don’t go into a firefight with their perennial rivals without expecting to take a bullet or two. They must have someone to hand.

“She’s been patched,” one of the Reds tells Skotch shortly. “That’s all she’s getting.”

Where the shot went, there’s a knot of stuff the colour of off milk. Glue, basically. Glue to seal the wound and stop external blood loss. If the pellet tore her up inside then it does no good, but Skotch reckons she’d be dead already if there was too much like that going on.

“Give her something for the pain, at least,” he demands, but their looks, and the tilt of their guns, suggest that demands are something he’s not in a position to make. Skotch bares his teeth, wrings his hands together, tries to think. The stifling fog of dumbness is still creeping through his brain, an army on the march and he has no chokepoints to hold it at, no forces he can muster. “Give me some Plangent at least,” he asks them, and receives only scornful looks in return. The old stigma of letting yourself get too dumb. Even if it’s just circumstance that puts you there, the other Gehirner who see you mumble and flinch and fumble basic tools will always tut and roll their eyes. Should have been more careful, shouldn’t have pushed the boundaries, shouldn’t have left the company … Skotch snarls, at his thoughts, at the world, and the squirrels bring their guns up in case they need to put the mad raccoon down.

They hit a lift, head up nineteen storeys, Lulu trembling and whimpering all the way. Skotch puts a hand on the ring around her leg. To reassure her. To remind himself. Who he is, at least. The animal person he’s still desperately clinging on to with the tips of his nails.

At the top of the lift there’s a Redcoat camp, almost a little town that can be packed up and moved at need. Hangings and hammocks, a forge and a little printer turning out plastic components. A big pot where the company’s SLG rations have gone, to be stirred into a stew with seasoning and any contraband goodies the soldiers have made off with. Lots of blunt orange-furred heads and tufted ears pricked at the newcomers. At the prisoners, Skotch understands. He hadn’t quite worked it out, because he’s got too many disconnected wheels in his head, but somewhere between the Separation Plant and here, the rescue side of things dropped away, and he’s just been passed from one set of squirrel hands to another.

“Get a medic,” he insists to his escort. “For her. Look.” Clutching at Lulu’s anklet. “She dies, it’s trouble. Seriously, get a medic.”

Some looks between them, at least, that aren’t just hostile or dismissive, but no medic turns up before he and the pigeon are stowed in a blind space covered over with tarpaulin.