Chapter 19 #2
All his stuff was turned over, of course.
What little he had of it. First Fitch did it, and then whoever killed Fitch.
Szerky, according to Maria. Szerky, killing the wrong raccoon, and then just spilling her hands over with buttons until Uzco had to close the account on the murder.
The way these things go, that makes sense from the point of view of the guilds and companies and society as a whole, but still rankles to individuals like Skotch and Maria.
The individuals who might be next to be written up on that kind of account.
A possum is worth less than a raccoon, after all.
The system works, but that doesn’t mean anyone has to love it.
Two maus, Eddi said. And maybe Skotch can sympathise a little. Honestly it doesn’t matter what the number is. Once someone staples a price tag to your pelt it makes you feel cheap.
He looks around this little hole in the ground. Going to be a while before it feels like his again. Maybe never. Maybe he was due to change his address and this is his wake-up call to shift lodgings to some place with fewer dead raccoons in its recent history.
Anyway, what he’s come for isn’t here. Just as well, given the number of hands that have been over every inch of the place.
After a little wrestling with the fittings he does spring open the hidden compartment he set up, using the tools and the skills his company training gave him access to.
Inside is a meagre handful of buttons, but at least it’s something.
After that, he heads upstairs to the sealed door of the nook rented by Ikelos the tortoise. The wartoise, the agent, the military model who fled to Neuwien so the last few years of his long life could be spent incognito and in peace.
Ikelos of Santorini, the fugitive. He and Skotch had spent more than one evening sharing the grappa that the tortoise loved and that Skotch couldn’t metabolise.
Ikelos talking about the old days—predating Skotch’s birth by decades—in a mixture of argots so the raccoon could only follow half the words.
If you believed it, the reptile had been on half the battlefields of the last half century.
Doing what? They hadn’t exactly stuck a gun on his shell and called him a tank.
Put him in a field and called him a stone, though.
Relied on his cold metabolism to fool the heat trackers.
Packed his shell with military grade intercept and decrypt gear.
Ikelos and his fellows, making a crawling electronic spy grid between them, feeding back to the humans they worked for.
Military grade, which meant way less care for the future than the civilian models that would come later.
No kids for Ikelos or his ilk—they’d taken out a lot of the original turtle-flesh to fit in the electronics, and it wasn’t like they gave him his balls back when they were done with his good and faithful service.
Probably he was supposed to be decommissioned at the end of his long tour of duty, because human military use predated any of the later regulations and animal rights protections that Gehirner like Skotch benefitted from.
When Ikelos arrived, he did so with a lot of history left behind that might yet follow him along.
Skotch helped muddy the waters, found him a place to live out his days, made him welcome, one foreigner to another.
And, at the end of all that, the final deal between them. One last favour for the old tortoise, one last offer to an up-and-coming freelancer raccoon. The weirdest damn arrangement that Skotch ever entered into, but it gave him occasional access to Ikelos’ place and his tech. And one other thing.
He puts in all the codes that get the door open, slips inside, closes up.
Takes a moment before all the anticipated arguing and maybe fighting.
For the last few days he’s been in a vise, a decision hanging over his head that he hasn’t known how to make.
And now he knows everything. Now Meece has finally spilled his little mouse beans, and Skotch understands.
What he’s about to do now, it’ll have consequences.
Not just for Skotch, but for everyone he knows.
For the city. Maybe for the humans. Maybe for Rule One.
The thought scares him more than he’d care to admit.
He’s just one raccoon, a US-engineered Gehirner deployed here in Europe because of some human corporate game that probably even Benson doesn’t much understand.
Gone freelance because raccoon engineering was always jittery and they still have a big old streak of independence courtesy of Mother Nature, that Poppa Geneware hasn’t wrung out of him.
“Well, damn,” he tells the quiet confines of Ikelos’ space. On his shelf, the tortoise’s shell sits quiet and still. Hibernating.
The door opens behind him.
Skotch spins round, because nobody’s supposed to have access save him. And yet there’s the door, swinging open sure enough, and there’s Szerky coming through it.
She’s got some kind of device under one arm. Some kind of electronic lockpick. Flash-looking piece of kit, sure enough. In her other hand is the bee gun.
“Oh, Herr Skotch, you look so startled,” she says coyly.
“Ikelos is going to be pissed,” Skotch tells her, glancing at the shell. “He’s got contacts. Political. Human, even. You don’t want to mess with him, Fraulein.”
Szerky laughs almost fondly. “You terrify me, Herr Skotch. See how I shake. Herr Ikelos’ technology was probably state-of-the-art twenty years ago, but the farms are cutting edge.
We have to be, to keep all those wretched rodents in line.
” She moves, as she does: perfect stillness, then a liquid grace as she shifts position, closer to him but not in reach.
“You have such worries in your head, Herr Skotch. So much that even a little tradecraft is beyond you. I saw you bring the fat pigeon to that mad human, and you never left my sight after that. All the way here. What’s here, I wonder? ”
“I live here,” Skotch says.
“Oh, you live in the shithole down below, Herr Skotch. Here, not so much. Are you going to use all this old gear to search up some facts, read the news, sell some shares, I wonder? Or are you here for something else?” And she drifts closer, herding him, putting the threat of her teeth and her gun between him and Ikelos.
She rates his reflexes so little that she even looks back at the looming, slumbering shell.
“Will he stick a head out and complain, do you think? I don’t think he will.
Not now, not ever.” She reaches back, then abruptly has her snout and gun pointed at Skotch when he twitches towards her.
Her hand twitches and he feels a stab of fire in his leg.
A stinger, buried there. He pries at it, even as the disembodied musculature of it tries to drive the sting deeper into his flesh. A fierce, burning pain, but just pain.
“A warning,” she tells him. “Not to think that you are the equal of me. There is a hierarchy to the world, Herr Skotch. I am a warrior, of a line of warriors. You are a trash-gatherer. You shouldn’t forget that. The next shot will carry a more serious load of toxin.”
She reaches out delicately and knocks on the shell. “Herr Ikelos, this is your wake-up call. Will you come out?” An innocent look to Skotch. “Oh my, he doesn’t seem to want to.” Her eyes narrow with glee. “It’s almost as if he isn’t home at all.”
His last deal with Ikelos, that bizarre piece of business.
Because the tortoise was old. Old and still suffering from all the cuts they’d made in him, to make him fit for military service.
Old and with history. Enemies back in Greece and Turkey and Cyprus, from both sides of all his wars.
Gehirner who’d raise their own glass of grappa if they heard Ikelos was dead.
And so his last wish was not to give them the satisfaction.