Page 2 of Green City Wars

Right now, on his way to Rootspace Central 38, he’s passing by those tables. Up close, the ivy clinging to the very café wall. He can stop and sit up, and put a hand out to where the fibrous anchoring roots link into the building’s grid, the dark leaves harvesting the second-degree sunlight that filters through the upper canopy of the city. He can take a noseful of that rich roasted aroma. Wasted on humans, who can barely smell it. Skotch, paused in his hustle, is in good company. Half a dozen other Gehirner of various species, stopping to inhale as a human on the nearest table sips at his broad, shallow, biodegradable porcelain. The stuff that’s like fine china for half a day and then sludges into crinkly cardboard for the trash-panda patrols to gather up and recycle.

Skotch shares a moment with his fellow caffeine addicts. They let their keen noses drink it in, because that’s all they’re getting of the blend of the bean. Nobody’s going to stroll out into the light of this fine autumnal morning and polish off the grounds, not in front of the humans. Not break Rule One so brazenly.

And Skotch has done that. Just the once. Desperate. Just hopped out right in front of a woman working on her tablet. A bold little nod through the haze of the virtual screen. And the woman, bespectacled, huge, blond, actually nodded back to him. Watched as he cleared away a half-full cup her colleague had abandoned when he got called away. Assumed, doubtless, that Skotch being there was just the city’s service sector working as usual, and not an opportunistic raccoon caffeine-fiend.

Once was enough, though. When the jolt had brought him back to himself enough to understand just how he’d danced on the edge, he’d taken his last—then—ampoule in the eye and sworn never again. It would only take one complaint to City Services. He didn’t want anyone passing his name and a contract to Tekki the ratsnake or his peers.

Rootspace Central 38 is an example of a particular kind of space. The people—the human people—who planned the city didn’t really intend for these little hubs to exist, but the radial way the infrastructure spreads out from the hubs of the big trees gives rise to little bubbles of hidden vacancy. And when you leave that kind of opportunity, the animals move in. It’s like the Jeffist mantra everyone parrots. Up to and including the parrots themselves, in their raucous, aggressive, semi-sapient flocks, where the vast hubbub of talk is half meant and half just echo. But what those Jeffist words mean is that where there’s an opportunity, someone’ll work out how to take it. Where there’s a space, someone moves in.

Small spaces, single occupancy. Big spaces go one of two ways. Mostly some faction takes over. One of the service guilds claims the space, or else one of the armies that run protection over them. Sometimes it’s a personality, though. One of the Rattenkönig class, and these days that’s more than just rats. More animals finding the cracks and prying until there’s a space for them. Building their own niches on the backs of everyone else, just like the Jeffists are so keen on.

But Central 38 isn’t Rat King territory. Instead, it’s Commons. Enough small local operators working in lockstep that it’s known as a safe place to go, buy, sell, deal, meet. You wear big boots if you want to make trouble in Central 38, and since none of the Gehirner wear boots—or anything more than a toolbelt mostly—that means trouble stays away.

Skotch slouches down there and looks for a ready mark. Finds his way to a rat who’s boiling up coffee and puts down a couple of buttons for a cup the size of an acorn cap. Strong, vicious, artificial-tasting stuff that he’s not supposed to get the jolt out of. There was that time he’d been flush, though. Uzco-mint buttons stuffing out the pocket of his super. Getting the caffeine hack had seemed a good use of his time. Now it’s one more dependency he’s having trouble supporting.

There will be someone around with tabs of Plangent under the table, strictly banned and who knows what you’re getting in the greasy hand-to-hand ampoules. It doesn’t matter because Skotch doesn’t have credit nor cash to pay. Instead he’s hustling work because, like every freelance animal in the green cities, he has bills and debts and habits and they all cost.

The rat who makes the coffee is also a freelancer. It’s tough being a rat. He has to give away a lot of free samples to avoid bigger beasties giving him a stomping, and every little rodent polity calls him a quitter. All about family, with the rats. Skotch doesn’t have family. The only other raccoons in Neuwien-Grunstadt are on the Uzco payroll, strictly professional. He sits with the rat—Iggy, this rat—and passes the time. Drinking rumours with the coffee, because Iggy’s position is precarious, so he keeps his big rat ears to the ground.

Iggy is going through a depressive phase, so either too much or too little of his own stock is going down his throat. He serves a handful of other loose, unaffiliated Gehirners while keeping up a constant despondent complaining to Skotch. The war’s coming here, he says. The Grays are making a play for the whole district. Every guild and every independent ending up in their shadow. Making it sound like Skotch’s fault.

“I don’t give marching orders to the Grays,” Skotch says, reasonably.

“Your people, then,” Iggy accuses.

“I’m not with the company, Iggy,” Skotch says. “And the company’s not with the Grays, not anymore. Come on, Iggy, you know this.” And Iggy does, or should, but he doesn’t let up with the pointing of those little rodent fingers. And maybe Iggy’s light on recent doses of Plangent, too. That’s how it shows, in some animals. Difficulty in processing new info, a loss of recent developments, retreating into calcified old memories. The rat still remembering how to operate the Rube Goldberg mess of his jury-rigged coffeemaker, but living in the distant past of the year before last, when he was a pup.

Eventually Iggy mentions that Uwe has a lead on something, and Skotch can only hope that’s current news and not the greatest hits of yesteryear. Uwe has a nook across the root-ceilinged dome of Central 38, festooned with wiring both modern-organic and old-artificial. The greatest concentration of undegraded retroplastics in the district. Uwe himself is a pigeon, but a freelancer, again. Not a part of the airborne army that’s currently shunting round the edges of the Red-Gray conflict, just some pigeon. Cyborg pigeon. Honestly, Uwe looks like humans thought augmented animals would look around thirty years ago. All that art they made, of creatures ravaged by tech. Visible implants and wires and VR goggles covering everything above the beak. One wing fewer than the regulation complement, and the other one atrophied from lack of use and reallocation of calcium resources. A body too plump and round to fly anyway, even if Uwe wasn’t cabled into his booth by a hundred hair-thin connections.

That blind head turns not-quite-towards Skotch as the raccoon ambles over. Uwe’s voice is gone with a lot of the rest of him. The smooth Tiersprech—the local version of the artificial language gifted by Santa to his Little Helpers—coming from fuzzy speakers buried in his mass of obsolete electronics. “Skotch, long time no see.” The pigeon limps three steps towards him, cables whispering and rustling around him like Medusa. One foot is just an aluminium plate but, the way Skotch heard, the original was short two toes anyway so what’s lost, exactly?

Uwe takes buttons for info. He is the bird of a hundred hacks, connected to all the Gehirner data-chatter—some of the human, too. You want to know exactly where the Reds or the Grays are moving next, you ask Uwe. Plenty of his customers are on the army payrolls, though nobody in an actual uniform would be seen dead talking to 60 percent of a pigeon down in Central 38.

“Praise Jeff but you’re looking peaky, Skotch,” says Uwe’s fake voice. The pigeon comes too close, the back-and-forth motion of his head sending little snakes of movement down the cables. It’s to do with visual focusing, Skotch heard, that bob-of-the-head so many birds do. Meaning Uwe could probably do without it and not end up constantly about to put Skotch’s eye out.

“Just between jobs at the moment,” Skotch says, casually.

“So you come to call on your good friend Uwe.” Skotch is having to concentrate, because when you’re light on Plangent, one of the first things that goes is second languages. The compacted Germanic mash of ’Sprech is supposed to be intuitive compared to what he’s wired for, but it doesn’t help. And he had his ampoule this morning, should be good for a few days, but you start double-checking every word you hear for errors, once you know you’re on the downward slide.

“Uwe, pal,” Skotch says. Pal, from the US-standard, one of those words that’s seeped its way into the local argot. Defiantly seedy, connotations of debts, pressure, underhand schmoozing.

The pigeon goes still for a heartbeat—a fraction of a second given pigeon hearts. There was a time when Skotch bailed Uwe out. Last year, which is a lifetime for some, an age ago for Skotch, a decent chunk even for a long-lived pigeon. Uwe hasn’t forgotten, hasn’t really forgiven either. Nobody likes being beholden.

“Grays are hiring,” says the robot voice from Uwe’s speakers.

“I don’t take army work,” Skotch says. “You know that.”

The pigeon limps away, taps at a few keys, moults a feather. He has bald patches, but then his alcove is uncomfortably hot from all the outdated electronics. Probably he’s glad of the ventilation. “Sometimes,” say the speakers, “work finds you.”

Skotch’s turn to go still. His hands—their nimble dexterity a major selling point of his model—are the only moving part, fidgeting over one another. “Tell me,” he prompts, knowing he’s eating into his credit.

“Company suddenly remembered you exist, just yesterday,” Uwe says. “Maybe that’s the work you’re looking for.”

It isn’t. It isn’t welcome news either, but it’s news Skotch is glad to have so he can get out from under before the wave breaks. His former employers, from whom he’s been enjoying an amicable separation these six long months, have suddenly developed an interest in him. Can’t be good.

That changes the parameters. Rather than just some work, he needs to find a job with someone big enough to keep Uzco on the back foot. Which means rifling through his super for the really big favours.

Skotch ducks out of Central 38 before anyone with an Uzco collar turns up with his name in their mouth. Heads across town by the rootways. Through the shaded and the dark. Past tunnels leading to clustered digs just like the nook he stays in. Guild-controlled, some of them, but some just rookeries. Spaces claimed by anyone strong enough to hold them, changing hands daily. Desperate dives, and he knows them. In most, there’s at least one name he can call on. To push, to wheedle, to bribe, to exact payment for past services rendered. That’s his stock in trade. You want something dug up, ask Skotch. Want the dirt on someone, the truth on someone, or even just a particularly useful lie. Skotch is your animal.