Page 7 of Green City Wars

“Who else?” Skotch tries, not really expecting answers, because probably Sly has some professional confidences to keep. The fox has thoughts, though. Everyone involved in this mouse-hunt is keeping their cards close to their chest, it seems, but a sharp player like Sylvester has been able to draw some reasonable conclusions from what his dogs have picked up.

Most of the pack are coming back by then, each with some prize held proudly in their mouth. Sylvester breaks off to reward them, trigger the automatic feeders, look over what they’ve got.

“That’s good eating, up that ways,” he remarks to Skotch. “My puppers go panhandling there most days.”

“Sounds handy,” Skotch says.

“Maybe I could send them up when they next go out,” the fox suggests, and names a price which isn’t actually that unreasonable. Another chunk out of Benson’s bounty, but Skotch knew the account was more expenses than wages. The Plangent is the real prize.

“Just narrow the field for me,” Skotch asks. “Small mouse, big patch, lots of Grays and Reds with itchy trigger fingers.”

“Rely on me, old son,” Sly promises, and worries one of the dogs fondly behind the ears. A scene of domestic bliss, the fox and his hounds.

One of the Rattenkönig families took offence, once, at Sly poking his scarred fox nose into their business. Sent a whole team of belligerent Gehirner to teach the old vet a lesson. Skotch heard about it after. About how those “puppers” got very, very defensive once Sly gave the word. All bite and no bark. So nobody messes with the fox, and the fox, for his part, plays very carefully around the factions and powers of the Gehirner back-city.

Which is why it gives Skotch a chill, when he turns to go and the fox says, “You look after your skin, Skotch. Someone’s making this mouse Serious Business.” Sly is worried. For Skotch, but also for himself. The informational ripples that have reached the fox suggest a very big fish. Whatever’s going on that Skotch has got himself involved in, it casts a longer, darker shadow than he can know.

While he’s waiting for Sly to come through for him, he heads back to his nook, where he now has the wherewithal to activate some facilities.

Nothing’s for free, when you’re outside the system. Nothing’s for free and that’s the price of being free, Skotch considers. Poetic. The nook spaces at Unterroot 93 are short of mod cons, but if you have the buttons then the world’s your oyster. Not that Skotch can eat shellfish. Something in them interacts badly with the caffeine hack. It was mocha or mollusc, in the end, and he made his choice.

Above the nook he sleeps in there’s a space with facilities he can hire. Technically it’s the residence of one Ikelos of Santorini, one of those freelance Gehirner who came to Neuwien with a full shell of buttons and never seems to run out of them. When Ikelos first arrived, he brought a lot of trouble trailing his tail. Rumour claimed he, like Sly, was a military model, not civilian service. Skotch had no idea what possible purpose a military-modded tortoise would serve in any sane conflict, back then, but rumour is 90 percent of what anyone says about anyone and he had no better suggestions. Ikelos turned up old and rich and wanting out of the game, though, just about at the same time that Skotch decided he himself wanted clear of Uzco. Skotch’s local knowledge and connections served to sever the various strings still latched onto the edge of the old tortoise’s shell, and a peculiar business relationship was formed.

Skotch has done several pieces of work for Ikelos since, and most recently a particularly big and convoluted piece of business that’s given him some privileges as regards Ikelos’ living space. When the old shell moved in, he fit some serious doors on his nook. Partly it’s because there’s some serious tech inside, a hotchpotch of repurposed Gehirner stuff enhanced with human components, tapping into the Gehirner’s piecemeal communications net and giving access to way more information and connection than anywhere else in this rental band. Partly it’s that Ikelos is cold-blooded and Neuwien gets cold.

Part of the big favour Skotch does for the old chelonian is to tell people he’s hibernating. Turn away creditors and busybodies and potential trouble, tell them to wait for late spring, early summer, whenever Ikelos might stir himself. In return for which doormanship Skotch gets the keys to the place and access to the toys, if he pays into the rental account Ikelos set up.

He slips in. Ikelos is up on a shelf of the space he rents, doing his best paperweight routine. A huge shell, really, and polished to a shine—another service Skotch provided for him once. Ikelos claims that his Strain keep growing, and that he’s as old as the entire Gehirner project and then some. That shell is certainly Galapagean in scale, bulking out one whole side of the nook. Rumour says that anyone monkeying with it while its owner is dormant can expect quite a range of potentially fatal surprises from his wired-in countermeasures.

Ikelos has a contactless paypad set up in his quarters, and Skotch touches his Uzco tag to it, transferring over some buttons so he can access the facilities. Ikelos keeps a terminal here, and the terminal is hacked for a wide range of access to Gehirner and human information sources. Enough to find one mouse somewhere in the whole of Neuwien? No. Enough to cross-reference the info Benson gave him, to know which of his contacts to tap? Maybe. Certainly enough to get word to a few Gehirner he knows within the targeted area and prepare the ground.

He works for twenty minutes, feeling his brain fizz—not just with the Plangent hit he took that morning, but with the knowledge of the ampoules he’s got in his super. The promise of sharp wits for weeks to come. Suddenly Skotch is a winner, top of the world. The fact he’s going to head into a war zone sooner rather than later can’t dent his confidence.

Then she comes in. Or rather, when he turns, she’s already in. He didn’t hear her, or even scent her. If she was willing to pay the mausgelt for him, he’d be dead. And he’d love to say that probably murder isn’t on her mind but, being what she is, it’s almost certainly front and centre 100 percent of the time. She just keeps her murder on a leash until she’s ready to let it loose.

Gehirner aesthetics are a tricky business. You wire a bunch of different animals up with a certain commonality of genetic hackery, and it leads to a lot of weird interspecies interaction. Skotch’s actual sex drive is strictly raccoons only, baby, and driven mostly by scent, but he knows beauty when he sees it. He knows grace. And she has grace. She’s made of it. Most Gehirner—mammal and bird Gehirner anyway—are constantly fidgeting. Noses twitch, hand-paws pluck, ears swivel. Not this girl. She’s very still, regarding him. A stone cold killer out of the country, out of the farms.

They discontinued most of the civic enforcer Strains. Sure the original human engineers reckoned the Little Helper workforce would need an external agency to keep them in line and under control. Not exactly complimentary, when you think about it, and missing the mark entirely because, as it turns out, humans have no idea all the ways their creations have been bursting their specs at the seams and going wild. But going wild doesn’t mean the work isn’t getting done. That’s a major part of Rule One, after all. Nobody—not on any side, not from any faction—wants the humans turning up and asking why the trash isn’t getting collected. Nobody wants the Plangent to get cut off or the SLG food shipments to stop being delivered from the Separation Plant. So the enforcer Strains are mostly extinct, or else scrabbling for a freelance living, or propped up by some weird amateur conservation initiative from odd-minded humans. You still see them around, but a lot of the time they’re living the same precarious freelance existence as Skotch.

In the country, though, the farms are a tight ship and they still have their minders to make sure all those mice play nice. That’s what his visitor is. And Skotch heard it isn’t a precise species, but something of a mélange of mustelids, all those long, low skulking carnivores who have rabbits and rats waking in a cold sweat at the very thought. Stoatweasels, is what’s on their official specification. She’s a little smaller than Skotch, by body mass, but one thing that her Strain is notorious for is its ability to punch way above its weight in a fight. A good thing they’re mostly confined to the farms, except here she is.

“They tell me you’re Skotch.” Her voice is like liquid molasses, slow with a country accent. Her long body is poised like she was dancing slowly behind Skotch’s back a moment before.

“Let me guess,” he says, casual as can be—and there aren’t many animals that can lounge like a raccoon. “Lost dog?”

She gives him a look like butter wouldn’t melt. Which is to say she’s the sort of cold-blooded killer who’d give Tekki the ratsnake frostbite. They have a whole warrior aristocracy thing going on, he’s heard, the Country Club enforcers. Honour duels and fighting scars. Not that anyone’s come close enough to put a scar on her. “I hear you’re watching a mouse-hole, Herr Skotch.”

Skotch shows no surprise. He’s already guessed that the presence of a farm enforcer, here in this space and right after he got this job, means someone at Uzco is likely on the take. She’s not here on Benson’s ticket, but someone on Benson’s team has a second line of income coming in.

“You’re not going to tell me what the big deal is, are you?” he prompts. “You’re going to warn me off.”

“Maybe.” She oils closer. A whole load of contradictory instincts are sounding off in Skotch’s brain, the basal ones all warning about predators and the more artificial ones purely admiring. Grace is always attractive. That level of physical control crosses species boundaries, plugging into that weird cerebral space that Plangent opens up. It’s one more unintended consequence of Gehirner engineering, that he can look from one end of Carnivora to the other and appreciate what he’s seeing. She ends up with him backed against the wall, locked eye to eye. They don’t actually have magic powers of hypnotism to entrance their pray, the stoatweasels, but you’d not know it right now.

“Now I could tell you to just go through the motions,” she says softly. “Take whatever advance they were dumb enough to give you, just spread those little hands of yours when they ask why it wasn’t you who closed the trap on the mouse. But I don’t reckon you’re the type to just sit around.”

“I’ve got a reputation to think of,” Skotch says.

A wrinkle of her snout shows what she thinks of his reputation. “Herr Skotch,” she says, “you know where the money is, in the Gehirner business? It’s not picking up trash. It’s the farms. It’s making sure the humans get fed.”