(Copyright Act Admissions/Lanham Act Disclaimers. This piece infringes copyrights owned by Sega and DiC. It is not a product of Sega, DiC, or Archie Comics. All available rights are reserved.)
West Molineaux/Mooresville, Robotropolis, 4 Floreal 3230
Josh skipped dinner and went for a walk. He couldn't eat. Some businessrabbit had been murdered in Terscala yesterday. No one had claimed responsibility but no one had to, all the Embassy regulars knew it was part of the grinding, depressing dispute between the innocent, stubborn wolves and the world that had displaced them. No solution.
But lots of ways to make things worse. Josh had learned from the Vice Consul that every tragedy was a weapon for someone. The rabbit's death had been spectacular and terrifying, and though he wasn't a Lachels citizen you wouldn't know that to hear the Radicals and the dissident Nationalists on Kimex and INC. On the Left, the Nationalist coalition was putting profits before people. On the Right, the Nationalists were rolling over for Robotnik, ignoring his pathetic failure to crack down on the wolf savages. There was pressure to issue a travel advisory, which would be hell for the Embassy and piss off Josh's counterparts at Mobian State Ministry. And they hadn't done a single thing wrong! It made for two solid days of unnecessary work, two hours a night slumped in an office chair, arms twitching in the constant glow of the unkillable ceiling lights. He badly needed some time away from work, no thoughts, just the steady hum of the evening traffic winding down.
A squeak of tires as someone brushed the curb. The sedan was blue, unassuming, wheelwells still grimed with the winter's salt. As Josh looked at it, the passenger's window descended. Frank Pulaski, scowling with rage. "Get in the car."
The backseat was half occupied by a minute light-skinned human who seemed to have been made out of whatever was left after the gods made Pulaski, which wasn't much. His hands barely emerged from his blue suitcuffs; his diagonal striped tie was tucked under a cracked brown leather belt. The man's thick plastic lenseframes did double duty, keeping the long mop of brittle brown hair barely out of the eyes in the center of his tiny head. His legs were crossed at the ankles in the middle of the footwell and he made no motion to cede it, so Josh found himself with his head bent under the ceiling, elbow jammed into the window, and knees crammed into the driver's seat. "I—"
"Shut up," Pulaski barked in the passenger's seat, thick fingers rapidly tapping the ALL LOCK latch on the door. Josh could only see the shadowed side of his head around the faded blue armrest. His tight beard still clung to his face but above the sideburns more skin shone than he remembered. Humans lose their head-hair with age, some of them, but Josh had never seen it happening to a single person before. It made him look sick, mangy.
Josh groaned, pressing his eye and left snoutcheek to the window. This far west the car was drifting out of the rebuilt brownstones and lofts that housed the upper-middle class ethnic mobians without political connections and into—what was this? Tight, narrow wooden homes, a quick climb up a cement staircase to the door. It reminded him of the bungalow belt, back home.
"It's maddening," Pulaski breathed, eyes closed. "Anything could be happening out there. I cannot see anything outside the reach of my own eyes. We might as well bring the Bureau of Elections down here and have a referendum on who the Mobians think ought to run the country—"
Glasses man squirmed against the backseat, hand tight around the window-grip, magnetically repulsed by Pulaski's worry. "Frank."
"Of course, we'll do the voting with bullets. We can have Pawel sponsor a goddamn MURDERFEST!" Pulaski screamed again as soon as he could fill his lungs. "It's dodgeball! With guns! He's got no respect for any—"
"Frank. Breathe. Slow down." Josh momentarily wondered if Glasses was Second Assistant Director Pulaski's psychiatrist. "I know you and Richard went way back, but you can't let this rattle you, not now. Wielblad's been off his leash for a while. We're not without resources—"
"All of them in that douchebag Ari Koren's camp. Our policy requires, at minimum, substantial influence over two, count them two, major dissident organizations operating within this country's borders. You try to balance a chair on one leg and were going to upend the whole mess. Five years and the next generation of AssaultBots will bepouring north over the border —"
"We have options, Frank, alright? Koren gives us some control over the squirrel. Long term, the Maybell and Posniak projects are still active. You can't seriously have expected this to be a walk in the park."
Josh turned his head, getting a fabric burn from the ceiling. "Baxter—"
"Why is the squirrel still in play?" Pulaski jabbed his finger toward the ceiling, slashed with it. Invisible touch-screen, moving things around on a map. "There. This is a great example. We're not routing money at her anymore; she's got no news play; why is she still conducting strikes! In Robotropolis!"
"Frank, Robotnik almost decapitated her organization—I can't believe I'm calling a half-dozen teenagers an organization."
"Six is enough, with who they got. The blue one has to be straight out of the black box." Pulaski shook his head, squinting with thought. "No. No. She's gone on too long. I want to take affirmative action. Options for that."
Glasses tapped a pair of thin fingers on a briefcase in the footwell. "Quickest action would involve intel from one of our assets with Koren. The squirrel made contact early today. She wants—"
Pulaski smiled angrily, lips pulling back from his square teeth like an animal. "Contact personally?"
A nod. "Will be, with the walrus. She wants blueprints to Napiers Hospital and a commitment on troops."
The human's eyes pressed closed, jaw cracking as it worked. "That does it. Hells, if she's aiming that closely at Kolensky, I'm willing to go black if this doesn't—You!" Pulaski wheeled on Josh, left hand gripping the seat hard enough to fill the air with the faint snaps of individual threads. "What is Baxter Posniak doing?"
"I—he—" Frank Pulaski was a large human. Josh was an average bear, but he felt pretty small. "He's—"
"Talk, damn it!"
"He's uh, he's been asking for contacts with Treasury, uh, that big, uh, firm, whatdoyoucallit, uh, Kogen Baird, accountants—"
"Not enough, not enough. These assets move. Now." To Glasses: "Who do we have to run the contact?"
"Tiger and Scully can't be touched for a week. I'd say Klingmann, but given the moves that, uh, Griffith Varitek has made during the past week—"
"Let's assume Klingmann's dead." Pulaski shook his head. "What a joke. I've got no one but—"
Oh shit, Josh thought.
"Give it to him," Pulaski said. Glasses pressed the briefcase into Josh's belly; Pulaski was scribbling furiously on a notepad. "There's fifty thousand marks worth of cash in there, some of it in Mobian sovereigns. The serials are tracked, so don't get smart. Follow these instructions precisely. You'll meet a weasel named—"
Josh's mind slotted away the words, instructions. Thirty seconds later, with Pulaski stuffing his handwritten notes into Josh's fist, Josh was able to get his first question together: "This is so she'll be killed, isn't it?"
The human clouted him and his lip swelled hot. "Do you think I owe you? Do you know how many felonies you've committed? Do you think you'll be able to drag me into anything if I drop a dime to Justice Ministry?"
The air felt heavy and wet as the car drove off, leaving him on a remote corner, each quadrant of street filled with another identical house.
Renee was off the case. But she read about the debacle in the newspaper, and the details were enough to suggest the underlying incompetence, so she decided to test whether Snively had ever bothered to remove her security clearance. No, as it turned out: Renee remotely logged onto Kolensky's server, twenty floors above, and read the forward guard debriefs. Then she sat and stared at them for about an hour. She didn't have any liquor—she didn't drink—but she just kept staring as the light from the windows died away, leaving her in the sickly glow of the screen LCDs.
—a fox child, approximately ten to fourteen years of age, fur toasted orange, approximately four and a half feet in height. Distinguishing features include a second tail.
So that's what had happened to the kid. It was worse than putting a bomb in a backpack without telling and sending him downtown. When did they start teaching him to enjoy killing people? I'm bored. They had given him, according to the reports, a small-caliber automatic. Let's play a little game of cops and robbers.
The wolf assassination had pushed the botched ambush below the fold in the Clarion. That single death was more important; it involved the mining multinationals and the other corporations that fed off them. This other disaster, by contrast, was a reasonable success: a couple cops shot, some fox's soul ruined. True, there was some minor property damage, but at least Gaumont Laboratories would be graciously compensated from the national treasury. Not a bad deal, considering their taxes were already so low that the Robotropolis Police Department was reduced to amputating neighborhoods from the city like gangrenous limbs. Walls laid so precisely that they seemed less designed to pen mobians in—there were mobians everywhere—this was Mobius—but to helpfully remind the humans where they couldn't go.
Mites were crawling through the fur of the body of the nation. Parasites. Their money sprouted skyscrapers in the city like hard tumors. Robotnik drives them to the border and then lets them sneak back in, fixing their suckers onto property and . . . .
. . . No. Not Robotnik. Robotnik had left the Overland Empire under a death sentence. He'd given everything he was to Mobius. He couldn't be more of a Mobian if he were covered in fur. But the rest of them, all of them. It couldn't have worked out better for the Overlanders if they'd secretly arranged the whole thing, put a guy at his elbow . . . .
Anger turned slowly to paranoia. Except it wasn't paranoia, the humans that had ruined her career were involved in very, very weird activity. Snively's incredible tale: sentient experimentation from King Maximilian's most desperate days in the Great War. Something that never should have happened, that Robotnik decided should be erased. Snively couldn't bring himself to just terminate the poor things, like some bad culture of bacteria, until his good deed escaped and was inches away from becoming the best tool for slander a rebel could ask for.
Weird. But true. She'd seen Amanda the skunk in the basement of the hospital. Bunnie the rabbit had given Renee her first concussion and landed her in Ironlock. The story checked out.
But then, something weird.
It was hard to complain about being taken out of Ironlock, but the order of events was too implausible. Posniak, another human, of course, was there to pick her up, and the guards just happened to bring out the wrong prisoner first. The right wrong prisoner, a mole perfectly placed to let ISO worm its way into Royal Army. It was too cute by half, and she'd told Captain Kolensky as much. Even if the raccoon's history checks up, there's something going on here that—
Renee, shut up. You need some time off. Just keep quiet about Bunnie and collect some paychecks while we regroup.
Okay. But shouldn't there be a double-blind operation on Posniak and—
I will take care of it.
She didn't know why, in retrospect—anger over her failure, the psychic fallout of her detention at Ironlock—but she hadn't believed Snively. Instead, she'd went out on her own initiative and bought Posniak a thank-you present for getting her out of detention: tickets to see the national opera. He was not rude enough to refuse them, so he came along and actually seemed to really enjoy himself. Which was good, because he didn't notice at all at intermission when Renee slipped his phone's SIM card into an identical model kitted out with a bug, courtesy of her friends back in RPD Controlled Substances Division. It would only give her half of a phone conversation, but it would transmit via occasional alternate-number broadcasts to cell networks, and wouldn't set off standard line-impedance wiretap-checkers.
It was illegal, but wasn't her mission in the forest illegal, too? Hadn't she just spent a stretch in prison that practically entitled her to commit a crime? She turned the bug on the first chance she got and heard Baxter ordering food at a Jimmy's.
Waited until the weekend. He was talking to a librarian at the university.
Another week. Pages occasionally turning.
After that, the business of wolf-hunting and downtown security had just somehow seemed more important.
But how, how could Snively have screwed this one up? The raccoon was the sort of asset that you dreamed about when chasing a small cell like Royal Army, and nothing suggests that the squirrel had suspected a thing before the ambush itself. But with the full force of the army and RPD and any other agency you need to deploy against them, how? How do you lose these people when you've got them in a building, surrounded by guns? Except on purpose?
Maybe Snively was just dumb.
For old time's sake, she fired up the app associated with the bug, and sent a request to transmit.
CRTS HANDSHAKE ACHIEVE, said the computer. Then the speakers fitzed and filled the empty room with a series of rapid, sharp pops, so close that they ran into each other. "Oh my gods!" someone shrieked. Shrieked it again. It took her a moment to realize it was Posniak. And then she realized that the pops were the cut-frequency remains of gunshots.
"Oh my gods!"
One of the vets grabbed Baxter's hair and shoved his face against the frozen remnants of brick at the base of the bomb-shattered wall. "Seien Sie still bitte, mein Herr," he said in the calm this-is-a-recording tones of a luxury hotel night manager on the front desk, then pivoted onto one knee, sighted his rifle and fired a precise burst of three shots into the gray darkness. Baxter had no idea what the vets were shooting at. He could hear return shots, but everywhere, all around them. It was as though the freezing air were filled with the mating calls of horrible, mechanical birds. As he levered himself up on his arm, another one of the vets shuffled past him in a strange wobbling gait, knees bent and fixed, staring down the rifle he kept gyroscope-steady in front of his chin. Without thinking, Baxter started to crawl after him.
The vets were of an indeterminate age. They were hard to see—not in the sense that they were good at hiding and using camouflage, though they were, but in that you could look right at them, turn your eyes away and be hard pressed to describe what you just saw. It was vaguely human in shape and size. It was gray: gray clothes, sallow skin. The face was dark, lurking in the shadows underneath a bulky ten-year-old helmet like a snail that has learned the hard way never to come out of its shell. Sometimes they would take a drag on a joint and a person would briefly flare up in the glow, a moment of boredom or fear or chiseled anger. They all smoked Mobian cigarettes.
The War MBAs called the vets Security. Security was a mass noun. "How much Security do we need for an Action like that?" one would say to the other, while the Security stood to the side, milling around like cattle, one touching her glowing butt to the tip of another's fresh smoke. The War MBAs, Manni informed him, always spoke Mobian, to reduce the chance that the Security knew what you were saying about it. Deanna had introduced Baxter to Manni, Kogen Baird's regular Vorburg operative, a crew-cut light-skinned human that looked like he could put his fingers through a man's body at will, and then retired from Baxter's current interests to spend some a couple weeks away from work in PTSD therapy. Then Manni had taken Baxter into the foothills in their weekly chartered plane, then taken him into the mountains in a towering Whiteout VTOL, Mobian army surplus. When the rotors and maneuvering rockets stopped, Manni took him out and across a snow-filled parking lot roaring with portable octane generators powering the perimeter floodlights and into a small building, to meet the War MBAs.
These held a kind of terror for Baxter: they were better than him. Political science was the art of making predictions regarding the distribution and movements of wealth, the application of force, and the interrelations between the two. The War MBAs did the same thing, except the wealth was wound about their waists in reinforced goretex belts, the force was used by men twice their size and less than a meter away who had no moral reservations about killing them for the aforementioned money, and the decisions were made in seconds. In a twisted way, what happened next was all their fault. Baxter arrived with nothing but the research, a drafty blue parka from the Terscala branch of Dickersons, a faint scent of airsickness on his shoes, and a burning desire to return to the VTOL's belly. "Look, if you know any of those names—"
"Oh yeah." The WMBA up on his stuff was a squatbodied, roundheaded human with thinning blonde hair and prescription snowgoggles, penlights mounted to each side with small plumber's clamps. "Fucking Pawel Kinziak, I think he's Pawel the Butcher, right. Rudi Sarkstein's a fellow traveler. These aren't our guys."
"Not Fourth Army?" Manny asked. "Commie front?"
"No and no." The WMBA flopped Baxter's manila envelope closed and pressed his nose to a bank of permanent laptops mounted on crates with duct tape and humming away. "What do they call it, Eternal Vigilance? Eternal Soldiers? These fascists hate losers even more than they hate mobians. Bunch of ex-Jagernaz Vorburg military intel hardasses peddling equatorial heroin to Mobius and young furry ass to the tropics. They'd liquidate half the citizenry they got left for treason if they could swing it. Fuckers hit our Firmaire cash drop back at the solstice, our whole damn escort crew blitzed on vodka. Cut Kowak's eyes out."
Manni gave a snake's hiss. "The fuck was that? That guy with the T-shirts?'
"Nah, the Kingsport CPA."
"They took his eyes?"
The CA nodded. "Plus ears, penis. Lucky they slit his throat, fucking savages."
"So," Baxter interrupted, desperately trying not to follow the anecdote, "we don't know anything about them, huh? No way to verify what they're doing with this money."
"Yes, no. Information is money. We could take an Action." The WMBA went for his belt and pulled out a wad of dirty bills the width of his wrist. "Fuckers are overdue for an Action."
"Action?" Baxter asked.
Manni scratched his chin. "How much Security would you need for an Action like that?"
"Buyers' market. Potato blight, vodka's way up." The WMBA shrugged as he licked a finger and started cutting up the roll, turning to Baxter. "You pick very deserving targets, so I'll give you a price break on the Action. Everything on you plus five gees plus interest due a month." As Baxter nodded and said "deal," he continued, "You ID the goods you want at the scene, of course."
The Dickerson's parka had a big hood; the Security used it as a handle. The vets decided he was not crawling quickly enough and dragged him forward, stumbling like a repen puppy until he was on his hands and knees in front of a black door. He had been told the target was a base that the fascists used about two klicks away, a former Gymnasium that was used for transacting business and (Baxter longed to pay less attention) 'maintaining discipline.' But he couldn't see that from here. He was lost. Brick wall, snow, darkness, the distant gunshots that he was growing to think of as silence. The Security arranged themselves carefully around the door. From Baxter's height on hands and knees, they were legs.
Thunder. "DURCHBRU—" The voice was lost in the cough of a shotgun. Baxter could hear it and smell its smoky aftertaste but he just saw the legs as the Security took him in, figid tile floors with boots on them. "KLAR," "KLAR," echoes from behind another door: "bruch!" They stopped again, another door-breach setup. The point man, pulled a shiny canister from his dirt-caked hip, kicked the door, everyone put their forearms over their eyes—
"Fuck!" Baxter barked, and in the brain-stabbing whiteness that followed the flash-bang, every single one of the pops and coughs and thunderous chatters that broke through the tinnitus ring were aimed directly at him. Something kicked him. He crawled away from it, found the door, crawled away from that, found a sleeping man, gingerly stopped, the returning darkness and color slowly revealing to him the sleeper's face, the grey nightmare of death.
He rolled away from the dead man and looked up at a pair of tall males, pale-skinned, grey knit caps, black steel. Their faces. Are they mine? Are they my Security?
How much money do I have in my wallet?
One knelt down and cuffed Baxter in the temple. "Stehen Sie auf. Auf." The man grabbed the chest of his parka and hauled him to his unsteady feet. "Schnell, bitte."
It took a minute for the place to resolve itself into a school. Baxter hadn't been sent to the principal's office for fifteen years, but it was hell to be back; the walls lined with paper file cabinets, wires snaking underfoot to some softly humming minitowers on a wide, old pre-War desk, an overturned lapcomp. One of the cabinets had tumbled and crap was spilling over the dead fascists and Security that littered the floor. One of the vets started flashing him crumpled graph paper with digits hand-scrawled in the boxes. "Dieses? Dieses? Mögen wir zurückgehen?"
It was a blur. The Security had a sack which they were filling with crap. Baxter grabbed, literally, a fistful of minidiscs, stuffed them into one of the wide pockets on his coat meant to hold the heavy gloves he was missing. They could do this all night, come and go in shifts. Surely these random numbers and half-trashed discs will put beyond all dispute that Robotnik is paying money to bring some sort of order to this madhouse. Gods bless the endeavor. "Mögen wir zurückgehen?" the Security asked again.
"Ja. Alles klar." Baxter rolled to his knees, swept some discs into a pile for good measure, grit scraping against the minute, perfect spirals. "Können wir—" Baxter glanced back at the two vets, then back at the other one, peeking around the door, as gray as the others. Confusing. "Wer bist du—"
The slender arm swung around the doorframe and pointed at the first half of Baxter's Security a gun so tiny it seemed dwarfed even by the rather tiny hand in its tight black leather glove. It shot the vet in the face, a hollow phup as it burst through the back of the man's helmet in a puff of fabric and flesh. He dropped straight down; an on/off switch. Baxter's other guard rolled to a squat and fired a haze of combat-shot into the door jamb, but the arm had disappeared. It came back about two thirds of a meter lower, almost at the ground, and popped at the man's unarmored knee. The vet cried out, grabbing his leg, and the woman came from around the door to put three more of her minute, deadly bullets into the man's face.
Baxter watched from his knees as the woman precisely checked the round in her pistol's chamber, then, keeping the gun loosely on Baxter's chest, swept the gunmetal cap from her head and scratched at her wire-tight platinum hair.
It took him a moment, because he hadn't seen her in combat gear before, and frankly, she hadn't been around Kolensky's Robotropolis office space very much. "Lieutenant Spitz," Baxter said. "Lila. I heard your ambush didn't work out."
"No."
"So," he said, the shock of the two murders slowly melting into a warm, drowning fear. "What else have you been up to?"
"Killing foreign spies," she said.
