Chapter 3 #3
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.”
“Sounds like a good business to be in,” Skotch says.
“You won’t be the one to flush out the mouse, Herr Skotch.
” That old-timey formality they still use in the country, along with a lot of other traditional ways of doing things.
“Your American paymasters won’t be the ones to get their paws on him.
But if he bolts into your hands … just remember who can reward you best.” She’s right up close, teeth practically at his throat, and he just wishes his biochemistry would decide whether it’s fight or flight or whatever the hell, honestly.
Because right now there’s a riot going on in his head, because of the danger of her and the scent of her and the sheer proximity.
He’s bristling all over and his instincts are shouting at him to do that tall stance, up on his hind legs, shoulders up to his ears like a cartoon gunfighter.