Chapter 4 #2
Skotch looks at his fellow social climbers in the goods lift, on the way up.
Always a good weathervane for how things are going, seeing who’s got the buttons to get to the top the easy way.
He is decidedly the shabbiest critter in the room.
There are a dozen Grays, sleek squirrels, soldiers high in the echelons of the army.
The sort who are going to be giving the orders, rather than receiving them, when the next stage of the war kicks off.
Any day now, Skotch reckons. Tonight isn’t out of the question.
A distinct air of anticipation to them. There are a couple of rats, likewise glossy and well-fed, who are probably errand runners from some Rattenkonig, armoured by association against any squirrel-led persecution.
There’s a badger. One, solitary. Another discontinued enforcer Strain kept going mostly because there’s some human amateur genehackers who keep putting out homegrown badger-ware updates.
And the badger is three times Skotch’s height and around ten times his weight, and probably she’s hired on with the Grays as muscle.
There is no Skelter in a badger. They are renowned for not running no matter what.
Mad bastards, the lot of them, and their grasp of Rule One can be rudimentary.
This one is drooling in a way that suggests her last update didn’t fix the problems it was intended to.
Skotch keeps his distance. The Grays are welcome to her and woe betide everyone if some rich human gets a rabid badger falling in their lap during hostilities.
Up at the top of this particular tower there’s a club, a human club, Casa de Alphonse.
Very fancy, very art deco. The green of the city grows through it, twining about the gilded moulding of the walls in a way that’s been designed with obsessive attention to detail to look as unplanned and natural as possible.
It’s like being inside a Mucha painting.
The interior décor changes automatically with the seasons.
You need to visit at least four times over the year to get the full effect.
It’s very exclusive. Waiting list a mile long.
If you’re human. The Gehirner get to just walk in, of course.
The club, and its neighbouring restaurant, they’re some of those weird interstitial spaces where Rule One works differently.
Every table has a little access hatch, and the animals come in and out to clear the glasses, empty the ashtrays, take payment with their little data readers.
They wear little waistcoats, even, to show that they’re on contract with Alphonse.
To the human patrons they’re next to invisible.
Every so often some wag tips them, but that’s considered gauche.
Behind the scenes, the Graycoat Army oversees every damn part of the operation.
Because the service contract—controlled by the sort of conclave of old Neuwien guilds that Uzco is never going to break into—is to clear everything away and keep everywhere spotless.
There’s nothing in there about what happens to anything left over.
So when the glasses and the plates get loaded into the dishwashers, they’ve already been conscientiously emptied.
The Grays have a whole bootlegging operation off of the dregs.
They even have their own little barrels and a special Alphonse stamp to show just how high class these lees are.
Even the ash from the ashtrays gets repurposed as Gehirner snuff for those who have the hacks to partake.
It’s Skotch’s misfortune to be recognised when he steps out of the lift.
Gray squirrels live a long time, one reason their population exploded enough for them to fill out an army.
At the top of the lift, there’s a patrol, and in charge of the patrol is a mean, scarred veteran who knew Skotch when they were both at Uzco.
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.”