Page 9 of Green City Wars

Uzco didn’t take it well when half its employees just quit to form an army. There was a considerable period of friction. Which is why Benson isn’t sending his regulars into this particular war zone—that and the fact that the Redcoats on the other side of the conflict like them even less. Now Skotch finds himself nose to nose with a bunch of squirrels, and specifically with this old-timer he remembers as Ripley. Or, as the nom de guerre she’s apparently decided to adopt, Ripper.

“Why if it ain’t Skotch,” she says, in the broad Furze all the Grays use amongst themselves, and expect the locals to speak to them. Abruptly Skotch, three paces from the lift, is surrounded. Surrounded to his top set of nipples, anyway, because they’re that much shorter than him, but surrounded nonetheless, and numbers breed courage.

“I’m not here making trouble, Ripley,” he tells her, but she has the swagger of the winning side to her, baring her incisors like she’s about to start whittling on him.

“You think we’d not make you from the old days, Skotch? Come here to scope us out for your chief at Uzco? That ol’ turtle got a message for us? Or should we be sending one to him?”

“I quit,” Skotch says. And under any other circumstance that would be entirely true, but as it happens he actually is here on Uzco’s tab, and he’s got a tag loaded with Uzco credit. It’ll all start to look awkwardly incriminating if they hold him down and go through the contents of his super.

“I reckon the old homestead is getting scared,” Ripley says. “And it’s Ripper, remember, Skotch?” Those incisors just seem to keep getting longer the more she bares them. “They got you scouting for the Reds, Skotch?”

“You know the Reds hate them more than they hate you.” It’s a complicated thing to say in any kind of compacted argot. Not clear just who it is who hates who more than whom, by the time Skotch has the words out in Furze. But, as everyone in that particular triangle hates everyone else, the sense of it comes through despite that.

“I think Uzco would be very unhappy with how well we’re doing since we got out from under,” Ripper Ripley remarks to her followers. Because anyone in any sort of army likes to believe it’s all about them. Skotch reckons Uzco doesn’t actually give that much thought to what its wayward former employees are about unless it clashes with company business, but he’s not so impolitic as to say so. You don’t tell Gehirner like this that they’re not top of everyone’s hate list. They like their self-image as the embattled underdogs winning despite the odds, rather than the bloated bullies they actually are. Squirrels, Skotch reflects, are nuts. But then there’s always a streak of self-righteous paranoia in all those Strains that come from the bottom of the food chain.

“Ripley,” he says. “Ripper. Listen, I went freelance a lifetime ago. I’m just working a case here. It’s not army business.” True, but also false. And the Graycoat Army probably reckons every little thing on its turf is its business. Certainly Ripley isn’t in the mood to cut him some slack. Enjoying herself too much, to have someone she can persecute in her first language and know every barb is understood. And some of her people have the nasty little air-powered popguns that some idiot rat innovator worked out a few years back, that are now all over the city wherever the armies muster. The rest have blades, because the Grays are very good at repurposing plastic and metal into a standard model stabby that slots very nicely into a regular Gehirner toolbelt. Slots nicely into a regular Gehirner too, if Skotch isn’t careful.

“Nice raccoon you’ve got there,” calls a new voice. “You selling him by the ounce or just whole pelt?”

Ripley rounds on the intruder, then loses half her attitude quick enough. It’s another Gray, although there isn’t much grey left on this one because she’s been through the mincer. Possibly more than once. Possibly she went back to retrieve her tail, because the one she’s wearing is very definitely wired on. No acrobatics and balancing for this squirrel. Scars on one side of her, burns on the other. Been, as they say, in the wars.

The armies don’t really have a chain of command and formal rank structure anywhere near as complex as human institutions. This newcomer plainly outranks Ripley, though, and that’s mostly because she’s a quartermaster. Meaning she’s the one who controls who gets what stuff, from all the goodies the army extorts, captures, steals, and gets freely given by grateful animals who’ve been allowed to retain all their limbs.

“Just interrogating a maybe potential spy,” Ripley explains.

“Don’t recall as how that’s your brief, soldier,” says the scarred quartermaster. “Sounds like serious business.” She limps closer. Unarmed, unfit, but they all make room for her. She wears her scars like armour and medals all in one. “I’d better take custody of him.”

Ripley bares her incisors a little at that, frustrated at missing the fun, but she’s not going to shove. The newcomer is deeper in the books of the Graycoat Army than she is; hence not to be trifled with.

When Ripper’s squad has gone to bother someone else, the scarred squirrel looks Skotch over. From a muzzle crinkled and ragged with old wounds she says, “You look like shit, Skotch.”

“You, on the other hand, are a picture of health,” Skotch tells her. “It’s been a while, Springer.” One of the calls he put in, from Ikelos’ terminal. Which foresight means he’s not currently being shaken down for buttons by a pack of squirrel chisellers.

“Mighty tempted just to let you get skinned, back there,” Springer tells him. “There’s maybe not as much left on the tab as you think there is.”

Back in the day, Skotch was in the wrong place at the wrong time when a Graycoat offensive went spectacularly wrong. Match, flames, unexpected flammables reservoir that wasn’t on the plans, that sort of thing. It wasn’t so much hauling the stricken Springer from the fire that means she owes him. It was getting her far enough away that the Rule One–related shitstorm didn’t get on her charred fur. And, true, that was because he was doing himself the exact same favour, but she still owes him. Or owed him. Squirrels live long, but maybe their memories aren’t so good after a while, for who did them a solid once.

Still, of all the Gehirner he can tap with influence amongst the Grays, Springer is the most highly placed and best-connected. He needs information and he needs access. Because Sly’s best guess points to Doctor Meece having gone to ground exactly where festivities are about to kick off between the Grays and their rivals.

The Grays are all over the back-city up here. In the branches over Casa de Alphonse, in the walls, in the service warrens that run behind the kitchens. The human staff just know that clean glasses are always there when they open the hatches; the wait staff know they always find clean tables when they lead the next set of diners in. Perhaps there’s a glimpse of a tail, or there are a couple of waistcoated Gehirner just discreetly pushing the previous drinkers’ detritus into the service hatch. A perfectly presented rat waltzing around the table with a cloth. The sort of thing that was restricted to kids’ cartoons and bad-cheese dreams back before the deindustrialisation, but that is just part of human lived experience these days. The shallows of Rule One, where the service industry is actually visible. And, behind the scenes, the Grays. They don’t wait tables or pick up trash, but they sure as hell take their cut from those who do. The mood, in back of Alphonse, is like a city that is either occupied or liberated, depending on who’s asking, but is most certainly very keen to ensure that the soldiers at every junction are kept happy.

Springer takes Skotch to a nook and sends a junior squirrel out for lunch, privilege of rank.

“You don’t want to be here right now, Skotch,” she tells him, over standard packs of SLG rations: nutritious, balanced, mostly tasteless.

“I mean, no, not much,” he admits, “but when did that ever matter? I imagine it’s the usual mess out there.” There’s a reason Meece has holed up in the war zone. It’s a hard place to be found in. Refugees and deserters and chancers from both sides end up there because the tides and battle lines of the conflict have left them no other place. Or because there’s opportunity.

“When things kick off,” Springer says, “nobody not ours is safe. Reds have bought a lot of freelance muscle.”

“Which is why I was going to ask you for papers,” Skotch points out reasonably.

“When things kick off,” Springer echoes herself, “I can’t guarantee anyone’s stopping to look at papers.”

“I’ll take what I can get,” he tells her. “Come on, what’s it cost, your pawprint on one more piece of filmy?”

“Costs me remembering who you are, next time you come calling,” Springer says flatly.

They stare at each other, into that awkward void that sits between human and beast, the heart of the Gehirner experience. Two animals who weren’t ever supposed to be having this kind of conversation, talking in a crunched, artificial language that shouldn’t have been able to support it, holding between them a complex, jagged piece of relationship such as neither of them was really designed for. But that’s how it goes, when you make something complex enough. These things arise, of their own notion. The human people who built these animal people—who made these animals just human enough—did not ever plan for them to become little shadows of their creators’ vices, but that’s how it’s turned out. Turned out in a way subtle enough that most humans have never really clocked onto it. And long may it remain so.