Page 11 of Green City Wars

She goes still. Moves on. The moment’s interruption telling him all he needs to know, so when she says, “What, like a weasel stoat?” so very casually, he’s not fooled a bit.

“Where there’s mice…”

She doesn’t answer. Down below, in the kitchen, the two humans head out the door. Like they’re the counterbalancing figures of an elaborate clock, in come a bunch of Gehirner with bioplastic sacks and a trolley: squirrels, a raccoon, a couple of rats. The trash detail, that coveted assignment. They empty all the bins with fierce determination. Load up their trolley and light out for the sorting station with a will. There, more of their colleagues will go through it all, salvage everything, organic and otherwise, that can be of use. The food scraps have already been scoured clear of the plates before anything could even reach the bins, though. That’s the big business around here. That’s where the mouse kitchen comes in. Why mice? No particular reason, save they’re small, with a rapidly self-renewing population, and they were there. Some escapee demographic who skipped out on the farms a dozen mouse-generations ago—early last year, say—and found a niche reprocessing scraps under Franz-Ferdinand’s. Mice know food, they say. That farm mystique, bartered into a niche in the big city.

A flurry of Grays rush past, heading in the opposite direction. Popguns slung over their backs, tails defiantly high. Tense, is how Skotch reads them.

“How much of a kicking did you give the Reds yesterday?” he asks Springer’s tail.

“Not enough,” she says shortly. Because it’s always better if your enemy retreats after a proper bloody nose, a good line of bodies to send to the Separator. If they just dance back like it was their plan all along, you know they’re up to something.

“You ever think you’re in the wrong business?” Skotch asks.

“Shut up.”

They drop down to another level. Skotch has to duck under a lower ceiling. This is just an underfloor space. There are ducts complicating the geometry of the walls. Part of the building’s cooling-heating system, that operates as much through transpiration as artificial pumping. And even the pumps are vegetable and bioengineered. Doesn’t mean being surrounded by the pipes can’t be stiflingly hot or freezing cold, depending. Here it’s cold, because that’s better for food preparation. They’ve got a half dozen moulds and stamps based off the machines in the Separation Plant. A bit like old-fashioned printing presses, but what they do is take a loose mass of organic material and, through mechanical advantage and the good old-fashioned lever, smoosh it into a tablet like the SLG ration bars Springer and Skotch were sharing earlier. These presses are copies, because you show a smart animal a trick and sooner or later it’ll figure out the details. Clever little rodent hands repurposing old scraps and pieces to make facilities that do not appear on the human manifests of Franz-Ferdinand’s business assets.

Down here there are, as advertised, mice. The space is so cramped you’d never fit that many of any other Strain in, honestly. They’re industriously taking all the food waste that the human diners left on the sides of their plates, sorting it into dietary types and pressing it into the sort of block that Skotch or Springer might nibble on like a sandwich, or a trio of mice could share like a palatial meal. The offcuts from Franz-Ferdinand’s are in high demand, Skotch knows. And this isn’t a service, so it’s not guild business. The freelancers do the work and the armies handle the distribution and take most of the recompense. Or, at least, whichever army holds the turf at any given time.

He wonders how many mice and other freelancers got caught in the wrong place when the Graycoats rolled in. A proper throwdown between squirrels doesn’t tend to care about collateral damage that only involves other animals. And it’s going to happen again, and probably one more time after that, at least. So Skotch needs to grab his quarry before anyone he needs becomes a statistic. Including himself.

Springer is getting more and more twitchy, and there’s a general sense of things happening upstairs. The only problem is, his mark isn’t here. He sniffs the scent ampoule, reminding himself of just which diminutive rodent he’s after. He muscles through the working ranks of them. Each little critter determinedly doesn’t meet his gaze, but he feels a lot of hostile beady eyes on his back. Him turning up here with a Gray escort automatically puts him into the category of problem, and that’s fair enough. He goes up and down the room twice, nostrils wide for the signature stink of that one particular country mouse. And it’s there, but very faintly. Like the rodent already lit out. Or like Doctor Meece is just in the next room …

“Where else are there mice?” he asks. The mice around him go still, or at least they keep working very hard but they’re also suddenly on hooks, listening, waiting.

“These are the mice.” Springer maybe hasn’t quite heard him properly. Her ears twitch. “Was that…?”

“There are…” Skotch inhales, tries to get a sense of spaces beyond this one. He knows how Grunstadt buildings are put together. There’s a common logic through the city. This low, cramped space will feed onto others, if he can see the access …

Springer leaps into action, dashing from the room in a flurry of scrabbling paws and the stiff plume of her fake tail. In the aftermath Skotch recognises that those little pops he heard were shots.

Humans never gave Gehirner guns, obviously. Have no idea the little toys even exist, everyone fervently hopes. But again, you make the critters smart, you give them tools and need them to understand basic mechanical principles to get their work done, then a certain sort of evolution of ideas is going to take place. The sort that would have given Darwin conniptions. No gunpowder—that would be a tricky thing to get the ingredients for, and storage accidents would flick the nose of Rule One. Nobody likes it when the rats in your walls get careless with a match and their arsenal blows up your living room. Gehirner arms come down to compressed air or springs. A bit of simple gearing. Small, robust, and easily produced weapons that a squirrel, say, can just about handle with two hands and a braced tail, or that Skotch could maybe level one-handed, if he carried one.

If they shoot you, needless to say, you know it. Popguns, the street name, suggest something cutesy out of a cartoon. Problem is, scaling down tends to make things more efficient, pound for pound. The tyranny of the square cube rule. The same math that means an ant can carry ten times its body weight means weapons tech that would give a human a nasty bruise, when scaled down for Gehirner use, can just about explode a mouse if it hits dead on.

The mouse on the left basically undergoes just that. There’s suddenly only half a mouse there. Sheer mechanical transfer of physical force does that much damage if the spring is wound real tight. The other mice scatter, abandoning the presses. Springer comes back down from the upper level she’d run to, along with three or four other Grays. Comes down backwards and it’s “three or four” because it was four up top but, by the time she gets down, it’s just three. They have their own popguns out, aiming and firing upwards. Another shot zips past them and puts a dent into one of the presses. Up above there’s a flash of red and Skotch thinks, The British are coming! The British are coming! Or the Europeans, anyway. The native squirrel Strain come to take back its home turf.

Skotch is the biggest target in a small space and doesn’t appreciate it. He has contacts amongst the Redcoats but in the heat of the action he’s just going to look like a Gray hanger-on. He sees where the mice are going—mostly through holes too small for even an elastic-bodied raccoon to squeeze in. One hatch is larger, though—it’s where they brought the presses through. He bowls a couple of mice over, shoving himself into it. Ends up almost nosediving down a vertical shaft leading maybe all ninety storeys down the building. The mice ahead of him are running along the pipes into another chamber.

His nose tweaks at him. The scent. The quarry. Doctor Meece. He almost wants to demand, Not now! Because he’s shifted modes from hunting to fleeing, and those are two entire different sets of instincts. He only has so much adrenaline to go round. It’s all the same direction, though. He follows the mice. He follows his nose.

Out, into a larger space. Mice living quarters, he realises. A mass dorm because mice like company. Two score little bundles of rags and paper, each with an improvised shelf or nook above it for a handful of possessions. Skotch and his fellow fugitives burst into it just as the fighting performs the same service for the far end of the room. Three Reds, two Grays, guns slung or lost, going at each other with teeth and knives. The dance of animals who weren’t made for murder but it got in somehow, between engineering and socialisation. Chittering threats, standing tall, arched backs, bared incisors, all that territorial animal stuff. But then those teeth go in, and the blades of sharpened plastic or steel or glass. Two of the Reds are on the ground in short order. One of the Grays falls back, slashed open—a different kind of red—but still alive. The remaining Red flees. Grays are bigger, meaner. It’s how they got such a foothold in so short a time.

Skotch’s nose is mostly telling him about the blood, the fear, the pain, the olfactory equivalent of the high shrilling cries of pain from the wounded Gray, the terrified keening of the mice. But beyond it, there’s the scent, the trail. Somewhere, in this mess, is Meece.

He almost gets himself shot, pushing towards the far end of the room. The Gray fumbles her popgun at him, seeing an animal more than twice her size looming. His US credentials get him a pass, though, and his spread hands say civilian, and then he’s stepped over the bodies, hearing the skitter and rustle of more bodies—live bodies—on the way down, and no idea whose side they might be on. Skotch, who doesn’t have a side, reckons there’s no winning in waiting around to find out.

He comes down, and he’s almost in time.

Another space. A weird corner block that only exists because of the geometry of more important infrastructure, and was probably supposed to be filled in. A windowless hollow lit by stick-on bioluminescent strips, jellyfish blue. And fitted out as a lab, rough but serviceable. Someone’s been doing science. Doctor Meece has been doing science, in fact. Has been in this one airless chamber long enough that his stink is strong about the place. Not here now, but there is literally an open hatch in the far wall. Skotch doesn’t actually see a mouse tail disappearing out through it, but there were probably only seconds in it.

And notes. Literal little scraps of filmy, scribbled on. The walls, too. Some little boffin has been very busy in here. A whole tiny chemistry set, like toys made for the most erudite of doll’s houses. A whole mad scientist’s kit in miniature. The mice have been busy down here and Skotch has the distinct sense—from Springer’s reactions and from the mice upstairs, when he was asking—that this isn’t a part of the operation which either army knows about. It’s Meece’s personal pet project. And Skotch would be very happy if it were just cooking up some rat meth for a quick sale, or medicine for the doctor’s dicky heart, but he really doesn’t think it’s anything that innocent.

More shots from overhead. A sudden crash that’s probably the badger he saw in the lift making its entrance. Clean-up crew is going to be pulling double shifts to make sure none of Franz-Ferdinand’s breakfast patrons find bits of squirrel in their omelette. Skotch bolts across the lab space, snatching up a couple of crumpled pieces of filmy, grabbing a miniature phial and stashing everything in his super. It’s all adding to the bad feeling Szerky gave him about why people want to talk to Doctor Meece. If the mouse has just concocted a new flavour for SLG ration bars then all well and good, but there’s always some story about rats, mice, fleas, plague, you know. Stories that get a lot more hysterical when you discover a hidden laboratory under the floorboards.

Hoping he’s not carrying any new plagues out of the place, Skotch bursts through into what he’d thought was going to be another buried space but turns out to be the outside. Meaning the inside of Franz-Ferdinand’s. The dining room floor, in fact. A vast, cathedral space, made more so by the vaulting of the tree limbs and vines that interweave about the ceiling. The rain screens are up, but they’re transparent. Above is only the green and then the black of the night sky. The moon fights through to give the combatants more than enough light to kill each other by. There are Reds and Grays all over, some in little squads, but mostly discipline has gone out the window with the wiser civilians. They call themselves armies, but they’re gangs, hoodlums. They call themselves soldiers but they’re animals. Animals given just enough humanity to understand a cause like us against them, like a tribe, a cult, a guild. Enough humanity to fight, when their wild forebears would have just cut and run. So it is that Skotch bundles out into a tiled expanse colonnaded with the legs of chairs and tables, scattered with bloody-mouthed squirrels and their hired allies. The badger, ten times the size of anything else, romping about upsetting furniture with a Redcoat in its teeth. A lizard wearing armour made of coiled and humming wire that keeps the critter’s body temperature up as it jabs at Grays with a sparking metal lance. A furious bright-plumaged berserker off Madparrot Alley, dive-bombing what seems like both sides with broken-glass knives clenched in its feet.

A mouse. The mouse.