Chapter 16 #4
And he should leave it like that, but those strings of duty and debt they engineered as drivers to Gehirner productivity pull in all sort of weird ways.
He owes her. She took a shot for him. He got her hurt, nearly killed.
Maybe saw to it that her future’s as free of flight as those little bird Strains they’ve got over New Zealand ways, that shine the humans’ shoes for them.
“Okay Lulu, you want your story?” he says, pooling himself down beside the pallet she’s on.
“Our hosts worked it out anyway. May as well tell you. Down payment on what I owe you, right?”
Her head bobs, eager for the news even in her current state.
He explains it to her. Just as the rats laid it out. Doesn’t say where, because sure as hell Ratlabs has ears here, but brings her up to speed on the rest of it, quick as he can.
She nods seriously, when he’s done. “You better go, Skotch. Before…”
Before the rats or Szerky or someone else puts a pin in the map and gets it right.
Because Skotch isn’t Meece-smart, or even Ratlabs-smart.
He’s just a dumb gumshoe raccoon who lucked out into finding a real good hiding place once.
As a weird payout for the last job he did for a good friend.
And maybe it’s already happened. Maybe Meece is dead, or in the hands of Murnau or Benson.
But if not then Skotch needs the mouse in his grabby little hands, because at least that way he gets to decide if he wrings Meece’s neck himself, or else who he hands the squeaker over to.
A million Gehirner in this damn city, he thinks, and not one of them with a straight answer.
He says his farewells to Lulu, hopes to Jeff the rats will keep up the level of care in the hope it’ll buy his quid pro quo.
Which it might, honestly. Hard to choose out of this bad lot of options but just maybe the ones who patched up his friend are the ones who win his loyalty when he’s forced to give it.
He creeps out of the infirmary. The eyes that see him are all faceted and belong to roaches, and he reckons the system they’ve got set up here isn’t quite up to reporting his movements to their masters.
He has a sense of which way is out, and even though he’s big, he can sneak like a shadow if he’s focusing on it.
The whole place smells of rat and bug and industry, but he keeps his ears on the swivel for the little voices of its masters.
Sure enough, as he’s on the way out, he hears a whole gathering of them.
Some convocation of scientists, maybe, except one of them’s not talking the same as the rest. Skotch wriggles through to get an eye on what’s going on.
There’s a rat voice there making demands.
He hears his name. Never a good sign, in his experience.
Amazing how few people have fond feelings for Skotch the raccoon.
The identity of that new voice is nagging at him, but somehow all the Plangent in the world doesn’t let him make the connection until he sees the little gathering.
A handful of Ratlabs rats, with their toolstraps and belts, and a couple in overalls not a mile away from what Meece was sporting.
And a couple of other rats, a bit bigger, a lot more pugnacious.
Rats used to the sort of problem-solving stratagems that their current hosts disdain.
Eddi and Loui, here to bring the word of Mother Murnau.
And maybe it’s just that her life-support system needs tuning.
In fact, Skotch reckons that it’s probably courtesy of Ratlabs that she has it, and that her life has been extended so far beyond her Strain’s carrying capacity.
Plenty of innocent reasons a couple of gangsters could be down here talking to the boffins.
But Nimoy’s there, and Skotch hears his name again.
“Yes, yes, here, he is. Working on him. Soon, the location, yes.” And if Eddi’s trying to be big and threatening—alpha rat amongst his lessers—there’s no suggestion Nimoy is intimidated, leaving Skotch with no sense of the dominance gradient here.
Who’s giving who orders. Just that the Rattenkonig gang and the scientists very much have their whiskery little snouts pointed in the same direction.
Skotch thinks vile things of the world in general and this particular twist of events in particular and reverses his course. In moments he’s back at Lulu’s bedside. She blinks an eye at him.
“I thought you—”
“We need to go,” he tells her. He can’t leave her here, not now he’s seen the underside of Ratlabs.
All rats and mice together, hand in hand to the plague apocalypse, maybe.
Or maybe it’s just that Ratlabs is the acceptable face of rodent criminality.
That there’s an amicable continuum running from Murnau, through the murderous Tybelle, all the way here to Rootspace One: that means he can’t trust them with Lulu’s ongoing health.
Too much leverage on him, too much threat to her.
He works out what needs to unclip and unsocket to get her off the pallet.
She gasps weakly as her feet hit the floor and he feels the phantom pain of it inside him.
That empathy, that ability to feel for others, that was maybe just background radiation in his genetics by nature, but which the engineering brought front and centre.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “We’ve got to go.” And they do.