Chapter 5
IT ALL KICKS OFF AT FRANZ-FERDINAND'S
It feels like there’s about a hundred different checkpoints between the goods lift where he met Springer and the green ceiling over Franz-Ferdinand’s.
The Grays are guarding access to their newly acquired wealth.
Down below, the last of the human diners are just settling the bill and finishing their liqueur coffees.
Three-quarters of the tables are already vacant and the Gehirner—wearing their little waistcoats in the establishment’s red and white livery—are discreetly clearing away the last of the leftovers.
Others are in the kitchens, emptying the trash, shuttling the crockery from dishwashers to cupboards.
Franz-Ferdinand’s pays a premium to the city for the full service so its human employees can focus on the award-winning menu and famously snooty table service.
From the interwoven branches above the diners, they cross over the kitchens.
The human kitchens, where the human staff work.
They’ve mostly knocked off now—given that all the menial clear-up work is being done by little hands behind the scenes.
The sous chef and the head sommelier share an ashtray that will itself be cleared off without a human having to break sweat over it.
And, behind the scenes, red and gray squirrels will fight over the ashes.
If there’s trouble, Skotch knows it’ll come soon.
When those last diners have paid up and looked big.
When these two loiterers below have stubbed out their dog-ends and shrugged on their coats.
When there aren’t humans around and nobody needs to worry about Rule One, that’s when the knives come out.
Right now, Springer’s people own this turf.
Meaning behind the walls, under the floor, the overhead of it.
The parts where a human wouldn’t be able to fit more than a groping arm.
A day ago this was Red turf and, given its value, they want it back.
A constant back and forth of shed blood and ripped fur until one side counts the cost and makes the sensible decision.
And all the while the other Gehirner, the contractors, the freelancers, can only duck and cover and hope it’s not their nook that the two squabbling armies will storm through on the next reversal.
“Speaking of country matters,” Skotch says to Springer’s scarred back, the stiff panache of her tail, “you hear of a stoat in the area?”
She goes still. Moves on. The moment’s interruption telling him all he needs to know, so when she says, “What, like a weasel stoat?” so very casually, he’s not fooled a bit.
“Where there’s mice…”
She doesn’t answer. Down below, in the kitchen, the two humans head out the door.
Like they’re the counterbalancing figures of an elaborate clock, in come a bunch of Gehirner with bioplastic sacks and a trolley: squirrels, a raccoon, a couple of rats.
The trash detail, that coveted assignment.
They empty all the bins with fierce determination.
Load up their trolley and light out for the sorting station with a will.
There, more of their colleagues will go through it all, salvage everything, organic and otherwise, that can be of use.
The food scraps have already been scoured clear of the plates before anything could even reach the bins, though.
That’s the big business around here. That’s where the mouse kitchen comes in.
Why mice? No particular reason, save they’re small, with a rapidly self-renewing population, and they were there.
Some escapee demographic who skipped out on the farms a dozen mouse-generations ago—early last year, say—and found a niche reprocessing scraps under Franz-Ferdinand’s.
Mice know food, they say. That farm mystique, bartered into a niche in the big city.
A flurry of Grays rush past, heading in the opposite direction. Popguns slung over their backs, tails defiantly high. Tense, is how Skotch reads them.
“How much of a kicking did you give the Reds yesterday?” he asks Springer’s tail.
“Not enough,” she says shortly. Because it’s always better if your enemy retreats after a proper bloody nose, a good line of bodies to send to the Separator. If they just dance back like it was their plan all along, you know they’re up to something.
“You ever think you’re in the wrong business?” Skotch asks.
“Shut up.”
They drop down to another level. Skotch has to duck under a lower ceiling.
This is just an underfloor space. There are ducts complicating the geometry of the walls.
Part of the building’s cooling-heating system, that operates as much through transpiration as artificial pumping.
And even the pumps are vegetable and bioengineered.
Doesn’t mean being surrounded by the pipes can’t be stiflingly hot or freezing cold, depending.
Here it’s cold, because that’s better for food preparation.
They’ve got a half dozen moulds and stamps based off the machines in the Separation Plant.
A bit like old-fashioned printing presses, but what they do is take a loose mass of organic material and, through mechanical advantage and the good old-fashioned lever, smoosh it into a tablet like the SLG ration bars Springer and Skotch were sharing earlier.
These presses are copies, because you show a smart animal a trick and sooner or later it’ll figure out the details.
Clever little rodent hands repurposing old scraps and pieces to make facilities that do not appear on the human manifests of Franz-Ferdinand’s business assets.
Down here there are, as advertised, mice.
The space is so cramped you’d never fit that many of any other Strain in, honestly.
They’re industriously taking all the food waste that the human diners left on the sides of their plates, sorting it into dietary types and pressing it into the sort of block that Skotch or Springer might nibble on like a sandwich, or a trio of mice could share like a palatial meal.
The offcuts from Franz-Ferdinand’s are in high demand, Skotch knows.
And this isn’t a service, so it’s not guild business.
The freelancers do the work and the armies handle the distribution and take most of the recompense.
Or, at least, whichever army holds the turf at any given time.
He wonders how many mice and other freelancers got caught in the wrong place when the Graycoats rolled in.
A proper throwdown between squirrels doesn’t tend to care about collateral damage that only involves other animals.
And it’s going to happen again, and probably one more time after that, at least. So Skotch needs to grab his quarry before anyone he needs becomes a statistic. Including himself.
Springer is getting more and more twitchy, and there’s a general sense of things happening upstairs.
The only problem is, his mark isn’t here.
He sniffs the scent ampoule, reminding himself of just which diminutive rodent he’s after.
He muscles through the working ranks of them.
Each little critter determinedly doesn’t meet his gaze, but he feels a lot of hostile beady eyes on his back.
Him turning up here with a Gray escort automatically puts him into the category of problem, and that’s fair enough.
He goes up and down the room twice, nostrils wide for the signature stink of that one particular country mouse.
And it’s there, but very faintly. Like the rodent already lit out.
Or like Doctor Meece is just in the next room …
“Where else are there mice?” he asks. The mice around him go still, or at least they keep working very hard but they’re also suddenly on hooks, listening, waiting.
“These are the mice.” Springer maybe hasn’t quite heard him properly. Her ears twitch. “Was that…?”
“There are…” Skotch inhales, tries to get a sense of spaces beyond this one. He knows how Grunstadt buildings are put together. There’s a common logic through the city. This low, cramped space will feed onto others, if he can see the access …
Springer leaps into action, dashing from the room in a flurry of scrabbling paws and the stiff plume of her fake tail. In the aftermath Skotch recognises that those little pops he heard were shots.
Humans never gave Gehirner guns, obviously.
Have no idea the little toys even exist, everyone fervently hopes.
But again, you make the critters smart, you give them tools and need them to understand basic mechanical principles to get their work done, then a certain sort of evolution of ideas is going to take place.
The sort that would have given Darwin conniptions.
No gunpowder—that would be a tricky thing to get the ingredients for, and storage accidents would flick the nose of Rule One.
Nobody likes it when the rats in your walls get careless with a match and their arsenal blows up your living room.
Gehirner arms come down to compressed air or springs.
A bit of simple gearing. Small, robust, and easily produced weapons that a squirrel, say, can just about handle with two hands and a braced tail, or that Skotch could maybe level one-handed, if he carried one.
If they shoot you, needless to say, you know it.
Popguns, the street name, suggest something cutesy out of a cartoon.
Problem is, scaling down tends to make things more efficient, pound for pound.
The tyranny of the square cube rule. The same math that means an ant can carry ten times its body weight means weapons tech that would give a human a nasty bruise, when scaled down for Gehirner use, can just about explode a mouse if it hits dead on.