Chapter 14
DISRESPECT FOR THE DEAD
Skotch comes as close to dying as he ever has, right in that moment, because the first shot—the one someone had time to line up—goes right into the Gray who’s got a gun on him.
Which means that gun goes off too as the squirrel’s slammed sideways by the impact.
The barrel of the weapon passes right across the breadth of Skotch’s body as the trigger’s being pressed.
The convulsive clutch of the rodent’s hands on the lever comes just as the path of the shot would take it through a solid knot of raccoon guts, but the infinitesimal delay between pressure and release means the spring-loaded projectile only hits fur.
A moment of surprisingly acute pain, when Skotch thinks he’s shot, and then the next moment, when he’s still alive and whole and realises it was just a fistful of hair.
Everything goes to pieces all at once. The Graycoats around the Separation Plant are simultaneously returning fire and trying to find cover.
The crows are all spreading black wings and flurrying out of the way—Skotch sees at least one of them brought down by a stray shot.
Someone’s going to have some mausgelt to pay when this is over, and the Separatists will get to sing “All Small Beasts” over at least one of their own as they feed them into the machine.
Eddi and the other Rattenkonig foot soldiers have their spikers to hand but mostly as a rearguard action.
Whatever is going on isn’t their kind of fight.
It’s army stuff, clear enough, and the gangsters try to keep clear of pitched battles for exactly the same reasons Skotch himself does.
Sadly, right now he’s in the middle of this one.
The other Gray who was holding him at gunpoint has a moment of indecision: kill Skotch or shoot back at whoever’s attacking.
Despite everything, but in perfect accordance with Skotch’s luck to date, he chooses the former.
That moment is enough for Skotch to get a claw on the gun, though, and an instant later they’re wrestling for it.
Wrestling is complicated when one of you’s a raccoon and the other’s a squirrel who’s under half the size and a quarter of the weight, but the Gray’s a game fighter, trying to use superior flex and squirm to keep hold of the weapon.
Doing so stubbornly enough that he ends up springing the popgun and himself out of Skotch’s hands with more force than anyone intended.
Sending him backwards quite violently, which is a problem for him because at his back is the hungry maw of the separator.
Skotch makes a snap decision. Some connection of mutualistic geneware and the fact that he and the Gray were once both Uzco kids has him grab the squirrel by the tail and haul him back before his head meets the metal teeth.
Then he shakes the Gray pretty damn hard so that the rodent lets go of the gun, which falls into the separator.
The machinery at the plant is good for bone and even teeth, but not really meant for metal.
The popgun goes into the mechanical jaws and there’s a dreadful squealing shrieking noise.
The weapon discharges convulsively into the ceiling as it’s crushed and then there’s a shrieking alarm to add to all the rest of the chaos and this set of teeth, at least, falls still.
The half-mangled popgun projects outwards like a jaunty cigarette.
Skotch swings the squirrel by the tail and lets go just about at random, sending the Gray tumbling across the factory floor.
Shot whines and rattles all around. The Grays are trying to entrench but it’s an open space without much cover unless you fancy getting down into the dents of the separators themselves.
Which nobody sane does, needless to say.
The rats have mostly cleared out, and he can see the attackers trying to push forwards against Gray counter-shot.
It’s the Redcoats, of course. The other squirrel army currently trying to dominate Neuwien.
Not immediately clear why they decided this piece of off-the-books mercenary action by their rivals was something they needed to break up, but Skotch doesn’t feel motivated to get into the geopolitics of it.
Instead he just wants to get out of the middle of it.
A duck and a dive and he’s away from the stilled teeth.
The alarm is deafening, and none of the crows is around to shut it off and work on the damage, on account of none of them want to get shot.
Skotch reckons such unwillingness to meet their own final separation suggests a lack of courage in their convictions, but that’s the sad state of religion today maybe.
He tries to go for the closest Red, on the unwise assumption that they know he’s not with their enemies.
That’s the second closest he gets to being shot, and it’s only second closest because the Red is panic-firing and doesn’t really take time to aim.
Skotch suddenly feels himself a big target, and his US-engineered heritage is like a big stars-and-stripes flag on his back that means Shoot me.
So the Reds aren’t his friends either, and no great surprise because honestly he feels friends are something he’s pitifully short of right now.
Except he can hear a voice. Even over the shooting, over the alarm, over the screech and chitter of injured squirrels, a voice.
A clear, high bird voice exhorting one side or the other on or just generally shouting for things to happen.
A bird who will be remembering every detail for later transmission to her human employer, no doubt.
A bird who is supposed to be a neutral observer in the world but has apparently decided to start making the news and not just reporting it.
Lulu, somewhere at the back of the Red advance.
Skotch snatches a frantic look at how the battle lines are drawn to see if he can get to her.
Because the vapid, annoying, pointless pigeon has come through.
Saw him get snatched and came up with a plan that might just work, if it doesn’t end up getting him killed.
Saw the Grays and understood that meant she could tip a word to the Reds.
Started a little side war, here at the Separation Plant. Pissed off the Separatists and who knows how many other interested parties, but Lulu is more about the moment than the consequences, in Skotch’s experience.
He makes for the Red lines anyway, crouched as low as he can go, moving across the floor of the Separation Plant like an animated rug with a stripy tail.
A crow gets in his way, wings beating at his face.
He’s not sure precisely what it intends and never has a chance to find out because a shot tears it away from him a moment later.
When the veil of feathers is torn from him, though, what he can see ahead is Szerky.
She has the bee gun in her hands and looks murderous, but murderous is really just the way her body language goes when she’s not trying to be charming.
Resting killer face, really, as is appropriate for one of the last pure-predator enforcer Strains that still gets geneware support.
The guards from the Farm Projects, the warrior elite of the Country Clubs.
Mean, basically. Mean from nature and bred to be meaner, and right now she’s locking eyes with Skotch and doesn’t intend to let him just walk away.
She’s tense as a garotte wire but her aim doesn’t waver. She steps closer so he can hear her over the alarm and general hullaballoo. Practically in reach if he lunged, but he reckons stoat reflexes can pull a trigger faster than a poor raccoon can leap.
“No more innocent act, Herr Skotch,” she tells him. “I know you have him.”
And he wants to do the innocent, he does.
Up on the scaffold, the teeth below him, he managed it with admirable sangfroid.
His adrenaline system is overclocked past all tolerance, though, teaming up with the nerve-jangling cocktail of sounds and the lack of Plangent finally to wrestle his self-control to the ground.
He gives her a mad grin that suggests that, yes, maybe he’s been stringing them all along, all this time.
But if it’s true then he’s not going to tell her or anyone.
She can wear his hide as a cloak before she’ll get it out of him.
Seeing her fury is a last tiny joy he can squeeze out of this otherwise unsatisfactory situation.
Fury not even at being wrong, but at being right and still being outmanoeuvred.
Her composure cracks and for a moment she’s not an engineered predator with a gun, but just an enraged mustelid with teeth.
He goes for her. It’s his window, the moment the gun drifts from him in her shaking hands. He’s bigger, he’s stronger, he’s got the drop on her. If he can get his teeth into her throat he’ll show her just whose branch of Carnivora is best.
She’s gone when he gets claws and teeth into that serpentine space she occupied just a moment before. Her own teeth tear at his arm but don’t lock on. Instead she puts distance between them because she’s got the gun full of bees and he doesn’t.
He has just one moment to sincerely regret his life choices when the shooting comes to play a surprise inspection to this particular part of the battlefield.
Surprise, because it’s not Szerky pulling the trigger.
Her body jerks aside so savagely he thinks she’s taken a pellet, but instead she’s weasel-dancing around the incoming attack, throwing her long form into mad contortions so that the shot passes through the gaps between her loops.
“Skotch!” shouts a voice. He’s already backpedalling away because hopefully Szerky’s gun doesn’t have much range on it.
It’s Maria. She’s got a popgun, a good one, air battery for two or three shots before it needs recharging. Ramming another pellet into the breech and bringing the weapon up again. Trying to draw a bead on Szerky as the stoatweasel leaps around, a sinuous blur.