Page 25 of Green City Wars

Tybelle comes down on the platform less gracefully than she might. A big cat, and she jumped from two storeys up. Just enough time to get her feet under her, to let the hollow made by limbs and belly slow her a little. The platform gives dangerously. For a moment she’s hissing, back arched and tail bristling. It holds, though, and Meece has dropped. Now he’s descending, when it’s almost too late.

Skotch sees what he’s going to have to do, understands it’s a terrible idea, but he’s down to butchered seconds to make decisions, and his engineered brain architecture is folding under too many demands. A million years of instinct are shrieking at him. The cat is a predator, but raccoons fight and even kill cats in the wild. Not even for food; ask Skotch why and he’d not be able to tell you. Two species in the same niche and morphospace, too close, too smart, too aware of one another, who knows? A raccoon versus a cat, pre-Gehirner, is a good match, advantage raccoon if anything.

The cats cheat. Or rather the amateur gene-hackers who created them couldn’t leave well enough alone. Tybelle packs more muscle into a cat-sized package than her ancestors, and her reflexes are faster-firing. She’s smart as they could make her, too, engineered brain processing options and the elegant telemetry of brawling quicker than Skotch.

Still, she’s focused on Meece, bunched to go after him, and so he at least connects, claws for her face, her eyes, anything for an early advantage.

For a moment he has her, hands at her throat, hooked to her collar. It’ll come free before he can strangle her with it, but until it does it means he has her located in his head, letting him bite and kick and drive his sharp nails in. Then she twists in his grip and her teeth worry along his arm, bloodying the fur. One hind foot rakes down his belly, a sharp line of pain from the single claw that digs in. He hisses and tries to hold on. For that instant they’re eye to eye. He’s no expert on cat body language but she looks like she’s enjoying the challenge.

Her whole spine twists, flexible as a snake’s. His feet are abruptly not under him where he wants them, but mostly clutching at air. He’s on his back, and she has her teeth in him, her foreclaws, as her feet kick and rake, driving the air from him. He tries to bite back, gets mostly fur.

A couple of Maulers turn up then. A rat and the gray squirrel who was part of his escort. They’ve got spikers and rush in to jab them through Tybelle, or possibly Skotch. That makes them just enough threat that the cat writhes off him. One idle flick of her paw sends the rat off the sagging platform entirely. Gray discharges his spiker; the flash of its little bolt glitters out into the air as it flies wide. Tybelle’s murder-grin widens.

Skotch drops. The flash of Meece’s overalls comes from below and he lets himself descend as fast as is safe, knowing the cat will be coming right after. The moment’s grace the two Maulers have given him lets him work out precisely how screwed he is, because what’s he going to do, exactly? Not just right here and now with Tybelle breathing cat-breath down the back of his neck, but overall. If he gets Meece out of the Alley, does he hand the squeaker over to Benson at Uzco Towers and call it a job well done? Does he want Benson to have whatever the hell the mouse is cooking up? More than Mother Murnau or the Maulers, maybe, but still not actually that much.

Or does he get his own hands on Meece and wring the rodent’s neck? Stick a single maus of gelt on the tally and report that kind of success. Strangle whatever it is that’s brewing in the mouse’s brain and hope he didn’t leave cogent enough notes for someone to take up the great work? From everything he’s seen, that seems like the sensible raccoon’s choice.

Skotch plays the hard freelancer. Not like anyone’s handing out bonuses for being nice in this world. And sure, there’s blood on his hands, but less than you’d think and only in self-defence. And maybe stopping one mouse from poison-gassing a city block might count as self-defence if it’s a block you could be in when the capsule bursts, but that’s not an eventuality close enough to trigger Skotch’s fight-or-flight response. If he’s going to solve the mouse problem he needs a humane solution.

Which leaves only one option: Where the hell can the mouse go, where someone isn’t just going to track him down? You’d think hiding a mouse in this city would be easy, but every part of the Gehirner world has some animal’s beady eyes on it.

With these ideas jangling about in his skull, he scrabbles down towards Meece. Above, Tybelle finishes playing with the Maulers and drops towards him.

Meece hits ground level, mostly by bouncing off branches, because at his mass-to-surface-area ratio you can survive a lot of fall that would inconvenience something as big as a raccoon. Down on street level he dodges away from human feet, then from a cyclist knifing past like a swift discontinuity in the fabric of the world.

“Meece!” Skotch calls. “I can help you!”

The mouse looks up. Sees Skotch. Sees what’s coming past Skotch. Bolts out into the human traffic, dodging their ponderous, crushing footfalls. And a mouse can maybe just get away with that. A couple of humans see his fleet scurry and jerk aside, there’s a cry of shock. Rule One teeters, but humans do know about the Gehirner. And so seeing a mouse out in the open has become not a vermin problem but a gauche pulling back of the curtain on the city’s infrastructure. Maybe there will be complaining messages to the civic centre.

A whole-ass raccoon barrelling through that human traffic is more than Rule One would bear, though. Skotch can’t follow across the road at ground level, but the Maulers have strung lines between buildings at two storeys up. Skotch goes across one, hand over hand over foot. Meant for squirrels so it sags a bit, but the anarchist architectural subcommittee was obviously organised enough to make something that can take his weight. Halfway across he feels the line move to a different drummer. Looking back past his own belly he sees Tybelle walking along it, impossibly poised, like a special effect in a human movie. His own suddenly hurried progress jerks and twangs the line and she adjusts effortlessly, tail high to show him just how much fun she’s having.

He drops down on the far side of the street, catching himself on the foliage of the wall, then to the ground. Just about right on Meece’s tail because the mouse has been playing dodge with human footfalls all the way over. “Go!” he shouts needlessly: The mouse is already going. Skotch is almost straddling him, Meece darting between his feet, under his belly. Behind them, Tybelle drops soundlessly to the ground and takes up the chase.

She’s right on his tail. Literally, the swipe of her claws leaving some dark and light hairs behind as she pounces. The scrabble of her as she turns the lunge into more forwards momentum. He can hear Meece’s shrill wheeze for breath, and maybe the mouse has ten million years of being prey to prod him forwards, but he’s also a mouse towards the end of his lifespan who’s lived as sedentary scientist for most of it.

The sky darkens over them. At first Skotch thinks it’s just his own vision because he’s pushing his own boundaries too. It’s not, though. It’s the locals, come to see what’s going on.

The parrots descend in a wheeling, cackling mob. Clawed feet snatch and rake at Skotch’s ears and back. A thunder of bright wings batter the air back and forth. Dozens of parrot throats give rise to a ghastly mutant gabble that runs the whole spectrum from comprehensible Tiersprech to just shrieks and whistles.

For a moment he’s sure they’re going for him, but instead it’s Tybelle they mob. They know a predator on their patch when they see one, and numbers make them bold. She hisses, yowls, leaps up to bat a couple from the air. The rest evade, circle, return like flies to meat. The brighter ones drop stones and bits of wood on her, or try to bullseye her with their shit. And Skotch would very much like to sit back and watch this enjoyable turnabout but instead he’s pelting along with Meece under his chin. And probably the mouse doesn’t trust him, but adversity has made them bedfellows and that apparently counts for something because, when Skotch has a moment to stop and breathe, Meece does in fact stop and breathe right alongside him. Although he’s so plainly in need of breath that perhaps he’s just out of flight, and there was never much fight in him to start with. Skotch is in the shadow of a great outgrowth of ivy the local street crews should have cut back a long time ago. Meece is in the shadow of Skotch. There is an awkward détente, the mouse still poised in case flight turns out to be the right option after all.

“Listen,” Skotch says. Gets it all out as fast as he can. The betrayal of a confidence, the revelation of a personal secret that he could have done with keeping under wraps. But right now it’s all he can think of. Meece watches him, wide eyes behind grotesque goggles.

Tybelle comes stalking round the corner a little later, after she’s dodged the parrot mob. Perhaps after she’s taken a moment to clean herself off, given their filthier habits. Staring down at the exhausted Skotch through narrow eyes.

“You’re short a mouse, Herr Washbear.”

Skotch makes a big show of searching his super, shrugs, spreads empty hands. “Tricky little squeakers, you know how they are.”

Tybelle steps closer, dainty as a water strider dancing on a pond. There’s blood on her paws and she licks at it thoughtfully. Parrot blood, Mauler blood, maybe a bit of Skotch’s own. None of hers. Nobody’s come close to breaking Rule One on her account today, though not for want of trying.

“We’re throwing down now, you and me?” Skotch doesn’t feel like he has much to give, in the fighting stakes. Bruised and battered, a little cut up, wiped out by too much running around. A raccoon no longer in the bloom of youth. Three years old, and not likely to see four.

“You amuse me, Herr Washbear,” Tybelle says. She’s craning around a little, sniffing, trying to work out if Meece is still in Skotch’s shadow. He isn’t, though. He’s still running, and maybe he’s following Skotch’s plan, and maybe not.

“Raccoons, nature’s lovable clowns,” Skotch says, and braces for her to come at him.

She doesn’t, just sits there and regards him. It’s the most damnable thing about cats, honestly. Now they’re smart and augmented enough to beat a raccoon one-on-one, and they know it, they enjoy it. They fight and kill dogs, too—Sly’s lost a few of his pack to them. Those ailurophile genehackers didn’t know what a curse they were unleashing onto the Gehirner world, honestly. But because they enjoy it, sometimes that means they don’t just go ahead and murder you. If they feel that you’ve still got some fun in you for the future.