Page 39 of Green City Wars

A squirrel sticks her rusty head past the tarpaulin, looks from him to Lulu, then ducks back out. Dinner doesn’t manifest, not even a corner of an SLG ration bar. And Skotch reflects bleakly that he’s seen how the sausage is made, and it’s made of other Gehirner like Lulu. And maybe that’s what the squirrels reckon she’s good for, and they’re going to save their rations for actual soldiers.

There’s a darkness growing in his brain. It’s made of ignorance and forgetting. Forgetting the complex chain of events that brought him here. Forgetting the niceties of being a Gehirner. Forgetting what Skotch is and why it’s important. It’s the old animal soul inside him, that all the engineering couldn’t quite crowd out. Always waiting for when the chemical supplements dry up. For the moment the bio-engineered neurology that makes Skotch a person ceases to link to the raccoon brain his ancestors evolved. For the lights to go off, so that he, the nocturnal predator and scavenger hanging in the middle of the food chain, can get off the bench and just act as nature intended. And here he is, right next to a delicious plump pigeon, trying desperately to remember that she’s got a name. That she’s a person too.

Fatigue is catching up on him too. All those escapades, so little sleep. He fights it. He pinches himself and grips his knuckles and grinds his teeth together, trying to stave off oblivion. Because he’s very worried about what might wake from that sleep. He’s worried it won’t be Skotch.

He’s worried that, by the time Skotch reasserts himself, he won’t be hungry anymore.

He puts as much distance as he can, in that little space, between himself and Lulu. As though it will help.

He wakes up held down. Fighting instinctively, snapping, snarling. No Skotch in him right then, just raccoon, clawing with all four feet, growling and screaming at the whole world. The instinctive push back against restraint, imprisonment that no animal can brook. There are what feels like a dozen squirrels wrestling with him, holding him still. They have his head. They tie a strap about his muzzle. They pry open his eyes. Skotch screams, a muted, squealing sound from between his teeth.

The Plangent goes in. Drop, drop, drop, icy cold against his naked eyeball. The instinctive buck and twitch against it, even though he’s done it to himself a hundred times.

Clarity returns. The fight doesn’t exactly leave him, but it goes back to its corner and waits for the next bell. He stares out at them, the mob of squirrels.

Lulu’s gone from there. There’s no great mess of blood and feathers, no taste of death in his mouth, but she’s gone. A terrible wrenching feeling grips him, as though a taloned hand had reached in through his gut.

There’s a rat there, amongst the squirrels. A pale silvery-furred critter with a bandolier of what look like medical or bioscience tools, scaled for clever little hands. He thinks at first she’s wearing a metal skullcap, flat and sleek across the top of her head. There’s no cap to it, though. A rat with a metal cranium, which reaches down and around one eye. That eye is glassy, and there are a couple of jacks and what looks like a tiny antenna behind one pink ear.

“Skotch, PI, gumshoe, investigator? Yesno?” she says, the words coming out in a kind of machine-gun rattle.

“I, what? Yes?” Skotch manages. The Plangent is a potent batch. His mind is spinning its wheels like a revving car, desperate to go somewhere but without a map.

“Good, acceptable, excellent,” she says, like it’s a multiple choice. “I, this one, Nimoy, me.” She raps a nail against the steel over her eye, tik tik tik. “You, Skotch, accompanying, coming with me, yesno?”

“What? No.”

“What, yes,” she corrects. “Purchased, bought, paid for. Also to your advantage, benefit, yesno, but coming with me if you like it, if not, in either case. Nimoy, me, of Ratlabs. Ratlabs has you now.”

PART

FOURNOT ROCKET SCIENCE

16THE MORAL MAZE

They’re deep under the central city now. Skotch isn’t quite sure where, given his lapses in cogency. When he asks, Nimoy says, “Rootspace One, yes. Rootspace One for Ratlabs.” And he isn’t quite sure where that really is, but perhaps dead centre.

“Whose guild?” he asks, trying for a sense of territory, belonging, a pin in the social map of the city.

“Ratlabs. Ratlabs, own guild. Good workers. Very efficient,” Nimoy returns in her staccato manner. She snickers, as though there’s a joke there Skotch isn’t getting. “Biggest guild, Ratlabs, by worker headcount, yes.”

They’re on a car. Not the city’s own infrastructure, not some repurposed human train or lift that the Little Helpers hitch a lift on. A little electric buggy, four wheels and a motor on a flatbed, and no obvious means of controlling it. Nimoy sits up front, but facing backwards, meaning Skotch clings on to the low rails because nobody visible is driving the thing. Beside him, strapped down, Lulu shudders.

It’s being controlled remotely, he knows, or following some programming, or there’s a rail set beneath the floor to guide it. Newly fed with Plangent, his brain can think of plenty of ways the whole thing might be managed. None of them make him feel more comfortable with the careering journey through a host of low access tunnels that mean he has to flatten himself onto the flatbed to fit through. Rat-scaled places. Nimoy’s ears flick at the ceiling as she observes his discomfort.

There are other cars, occasionally; passing by so close as to almost strike sparks, but never quite touching. The lab rats have their transport network sorted out.

“How come,” he’s talking more to distract himself than any serious attempt at investigation, “you got the prime real estate?”

“Not at first. Originally, further, higher, less advantageous, yesno?” Nimoy rattles off. “Moved in, made offers. Innovation, success; success, leverage. Moving in, Ratlabs, yes. Facilities, access.”

“Hire you some guns and turf out a few Rattenkönige?” Skotch guesses.

Nimoy is scandalised. “Violence? No! Negotiations, yes! Much service, Ratlabs to Rat Kings, Ratlabs to guilds. Good neighbours, yesno?”

He’s not convinced, but it’s her car so he keeps schtum. Changing the subject to: “You can help her?”

She cocks her head. “Why?”