Chapter 15
RED-HANDED
He’s asking for a medic from the start. Not for himself but for Lulu.
At first calling from his stretcher, hauled by four squirrels away from the Separation Plant, and never has he been happier to see something recede into the tangle of the green city’s underworkings.
Then from his feet, because he’s bone-tired, muddle-headed, and cut up, but he can walk.
The Redcoats stretchering him look mutinous about it for a second, but he’s a big raccoon and he’s saving them some grunt work.
Lulu isn’t walking out of here on her own two feet.
Her bulk bows the slightly degraded plastic of the stretcher.
One wing trails, obviously not going to be carrying her through the air any time soon.
Perhaps ever. There’s a constant throaty sound in her breast that Skotch can parse as whimpering.
Her eyes stare both sides of her and her feet claw and clutch.
Her breast has gone red as a robin’s with lost blood.
“I’m here,” Skotch tells her, as though that’s ever comforted anyone. Then looks daggers at the squirrels who’ve been freed up from hauling him. “Get a medic, will you?”
Medicine for Gehirner is tricky. Nutrition is brought to them by the somewhat morbid repast of the SLG bars, to which Skotch just narrowly avoided making a contribution.
There are little guilds who monitor Gehirner health across the city and code for medications whenever any sickness gets hold.
Three times in his years in Neuwien, Skotch has scarfed down pills with his rations because some epidemic or other was being wrestled to the ropes.
Health notices get posted up everywhere, and when the white doves and rats with the red markings start distributing pills, nobody gets in their way, as neutral and respected as their opposite numbers, the carrion birds of the Separation Plants.
Except Skotch has some words to say about just how they use their neutrality.
Injury is tricky, though. There’s no safety net for something that lays you low but isn’t catching.
Often it’s just age catching up with you, because the majority of Strains only have a few years, even with their operational lifespans increased by the engineering.
From a human perspective there’s not much mileage in a big expensive rat hospital so that a washed-out old rodent can limp on another three weeks.
Industrial accident is the other common cause of damage built into the system.
The guilds look after their own,. They build what facilities they can within the walls of the city, and a fair body of knowledge about how various Strains are put together has accumulated, and gets shared city to city.
Not quite a global network of hospitals urgently flying out mangled animals to this or that specialist unit, but they’re getting there.
The Little Helpers have only been a thing for a few decades after all.
Amongst the armies, and at various other strata of the Gehirner world, the most common cause of injury is precisely this, though: violence. The Reds don’t go into a firefight with their perennial rivals without expecting to take a bullet or two. They must have someone to hand.
“She’s been patched,” one of the Reds tells Skotch shortly. “That’s all she’s getting.”
Where the shot went, there’s a knot of stuff the colour of off milk. Glue, basically. Glue to seal the wound and stop external blood loss. If the pellet tore her up inside then it does no good, but Skotch reckons she’d be dead already if there was too much like that going on.
“Give her something for the pain, at least,” he demands, but their looks, and the tilt of their guns, suggest that demands are something he’s not in a position to make.
Skotch bares his teeth, wrings his hands together, tries to think.
The stifling fog of dumbness is still creeping through his brain, an army on the march and he has no chokepoints to hold it at, no forces he can muster.
“Give me some Plangent at least,” he asks them, and receives only scornful looks in return.
The old stigma of letting yourself get too dumb.
Even if it’s just circumstance that puts you there, the other Gehirner who see you mumble and flinch and fumble basic tools will always tut and roll their eyes.
Should have been more careful, shouldn’t have pushed the boundaries, shouldn’t have left the company …
Skotch snarls, at his thoughts, at the world, and the squirrels bring their guns up in case they need to put the mad raccoon down.
They hit a lift, head up nineteen storeys, Lulu trembling and whimpering all the way. Skotch puts a hand on the ring around her leg. To reassure her. To remind himself. Who he is, at least. The animal person he’s still desperately clinging on to with the tips of his nails.
At the top of the lift there’s a Redcoat camp, almost a little town that can be packed up and moved at need.
Hangings and hammocks, a forge and a little printer turning out plastic components.
A big pot where the company’s SLG rations have gone, to be stirred into a stew with seasoning and any contraband goodies the soldiers have made off with.
Lots of blunt orange-furred heads and tufted ears pricked at the newcomers.
At the prisoners, Skotch understands. He hadn’t quite worked it out, because he’s got too many disconnected wheels in his head, but somewhere between the Separation Plant and here, the rescue side of things dropped away, and he’s just been passed from one set of squirrel hands to another.
“Get a medic,” he insists to his escort. “For her. Look.” Clutching at Lulu’s anklet. “She dies, it’s trouble. Seriously, get a medic.”
Some looks between them, at least, that aren’t just hostile or dismissive, but no medic turns up before he and the pigeon are stowed in a blind space covered over with tarpaulin.
“I’m sorry, Lulu,” Skotch says. It’s hard, and not just from the way his mind is fogging up.
One of her eyes swivels and blinks until it’s on him. “Hurts,” she gasps. All those words in her, put them under sufficient pressure and that’s what they bake down to.
“You came for me,” he said. “You shouldn’t have. I’m not worth it.”
“Owe me a story,” she forces out of her beak, eyes bulging at the strain.
He’s about to tell her, then. Tell her all of what even the threat of the separator hadn’t scared out of him.
Because he owes her. Because the concept of owing and paying, of doing your duty, is part of the neural engineering they’re all blessed and cursed with.
That humans gave them so they’d want to do their jobs, and that ran on to generate the tangled emergent world of Gehirner society that most humans can’t even guess at.
He owes, and so he opens his mouth to tell what might be the most valuable secret in the whole of Neuwien-Grunstadt. Then the squirrels come in.
Not a medic. The self-important mustachioed officer with the shirt of button mail, along with a handful of regulars with popguns. One of them sets down a tiny stool and the lead squirrel hops up onto it and crouches there, just about at eye level with Skotch sitting on the ground.
“They tell me you’re Skotch, eh?” he says. “The name’s Hansard, but the fellows round here call me Brass-Shirt. Can’t imagine why.”
“Let me guess,” Skotch tells him. “You’ve got a few questions.”
“Just a couple,” the squirrel agrees. He has a laid-back, humorous manner, quite unlike the run of squirrels who end up a bit frantic by default. Under other circumstances Skotch feels he might get on with this bravo, but right now he has priorities.
“I will answer anything you’ve got, but first she needs help.”
Brass-Shirt narrows his eyes. “Now, son, one might observe that we’ve got you, and we’re in a position to be quite encouraging, as far as answers are concerned. I don’t want you labouring under any false pretences regarding your position here. You’re an enemy combatant and you’re a prisoner.”
“I’m not with the Grays,” Skotch says. “Not even with Uzco. Just me, on my own.” Finding the concepts hard to put into words. Complicated things, belonging, factions.
“You’re a New-worlder, though. Means you’re on their side often as not,” Brass-Shirt says philosophically.
“Please,” Skotch gets out.
Hansard Brass-Shirt stares up at the low ceiling, bares his big incisors, looks around at his escort. “One of you fellows go fetch some pain meds. And disinfectant, too. Looks like someone got their teeth into you, friend.”
Skotch can only nod. Feels like someone beat him all over with sticks, too. He just sags there on the floor, and honestly nothing sags quite like a raccoon.
A subordinate squirrel ducks out and then ducks back.
Lulu gets a shot of something, and if it won’t help her live it will at least let her die easier if that’s the path she’s on.
Skotch doesn’t feel he’s got the credit to demand exploratory surgery right then, and probably he couldn’t even explain what that was.
His grasp of the concept is receding away from him like a drowner in deep water.
He flinches. One of the squirrels has prodded him with a gun.
He realises Brass-Shirt had made a start on his questions.
Tries to recapture what was said, fails.
Tries to ask the officer to repeat himself.
Fails with that, too. In the end just makes a pitiful gesture, pulling at his lower eyelid.
What comes out of his jaws is just a chattering sound where fragments of words get ground up like meat in the teeth of the separator.
Because of the different delivery methods, the squirrels don’t immediately understand, but then one of them obviously recalls the slightly uncomfortable way that Skotch’s Strain is set up. The same orderly nips out and back in, this time with an ampoule in his hands.