Chapter 5 #2
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.
He can be no other. Cutting a straight course through all that blood and thunder, almost under the badger’s stomping feet.
A mouse in a trailing brown coat, clutching a satchel.
When he casts a panicked look back at Skotch, his eyes are behind goggles, making him weirdly buglike, alien. Doctor Meece, I presume.
Skotch sets off after him but he’s not the only hunter who’s done his homework. Halfway across the floor, the whip of the rodent’s tail still beyond his claws, and Szerky’s there.
She comes from above, from who knows where, from the nightmares of any small mammal evolved to hide in a burrow when the predators come calling.
The impact bowls Meece over. He goes onto his back, forepaws still locked about the satchel, but kicking fiercely at her with his hindfeet.
She bares her teeth, pinkish eyes pinning him.
Skotch—still running—thinks she’s going to bite his throat out, but Szerky is a familiar of the Country Club, a civilized weasel.
She pulls out a long blade, polished and treated wood, lacquered sharp as glass and hard as metal.
Her orders are not Skotch’s. No “Bring ’em back alive” for her.
A random squirrel saves Meece from immediate evisceration.
Just some Gray, blundering in, seeing a stoatweasel who wasn’t on the muster rolls and taking her for an enemy.
Which she is, just not of him in particular.
The squirrel goes for her with his own blade, and Szerky brings out something from her super.
It’s a gun, Skotch sees. Not the popgun theatrics of the two armies, but something squat and nasty.
It makes a high whining sound as it fires, and the squirrel goes down.
Not clean down, but twitching and spasming, the impact point visibly swelling with anaphylactic shock.
Nasty little toy, some Country Club speciality. Skotch has never seen one before.