(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.)
Borgadan International Airport, Robotropolis, 21 Firmaire 3228
"Any luggage?" asked the panther. She slid a little gray plastic tray onto the white folding table, the buttons on the stiff sleeve of her green uniform gleaming a bit of stray halogen light leaking from the little translucent plastic cell where they did the searches.
"Nope," Molly answered with a smile. One after another, her fingers dropped into the tray her keys, her wallet, her palm-balm for the winter, a pack of Comiskey bubblegum, and a couple of five-sovereign coins. With the exception of the furbrown winter jacket and the other clothes on her body, everything that she owned was in the tray.
"Mmm-hmm," the panther hummed, swirling the bowl beneath her eye like a miner panning for gold. "Can I see—uh huh, thank you . . . ." She leaned closer to Molly and squinted, trying to match the smiling raccoon with the face on the ID Molly held aloft by her head. "Uh huh. Uh huh . . . ." The guard's face dropped cold and flat as she saw the little red warning circle next to Molly's picture: half-citizen. "Step through the light-rad, please."
"Yup." Molly gave her ID to the airport guard and stepped through the plastic doorway. There was no squawk from the machine, but her little red circle had earned her a lot of practice: without waiting for the command she planted her feet beneath her shoulders and spread her arms wide, fanning her fingers in their bare-tipped gloves.
"Destination?" the guard's brother-in-arms, a sloth, mumbled. He loudly masticated a wad of gum in his left cheek while one hand lifted a faintly whining black wand and slowly passed it over the raccoon's limbs.
"Terscala," she said, growling inwardly at the hand-scanner's invisible caress as it slid over her belly. Her tail seized in a brief wave of panic—you're losing it you can't lose it just one more fucking time, everything suddenly erupting into life to grab her again, Dyson, the police—before she beat it back down. That was good, she thought, as her heart thumped dully in the aftermath;that was alright. It looked like anger, and a little bit of anger was good. She'd never been happy to be searched before. It would be suspicious for the half-citizen to be too happy.
"Boarding pass?" asked the panther, glancing up from Molly's open wallet.
"It's in there," she answered over one lifted arm.
The panther sniffed and began to flip an index finger rapidly through the receipts and dry cleaning tags in her wallet. The sloth grunted as he waved the wand under her tail—how could she hide a gun in hertail? "Reason for travel?" he droned.
"Business." She didn't know why Darcy's people needed the fifteenth of Firmaire, but it worked out well. Structural Engineering Con 3228 ran the twenty-third through the twenty-fifth in Terscala, and her story was . . . plausible. As long as they didn't call Gaumont . . . .
"Ma'am." Molly blinked. The panther was offering her tray of things; the sloth was slowly creaking back down onto a little padded stool. "Have a nice trip," the panther said flatly.
". . . Thanks. Thanks very much," Molly answered, taking her boarding pass. Her lucky day.
She shuffled unhurriedly out of security and into the terminal, broad, slow steps rolling the weight in her hips. Cold white sunlight gleamed through the perfect windows that striped the long ceiling far overhead, spotless—heated, she guessed, with a transparent monofilament mesh to keep the snow from caking on the edges. It was a weekday and everything was open, all of the little magazine shops, battery shops, shops filled with lowland Coolette wine and highland Corukas wine and brandy and every other kind of liquor matched to a part of the country, free of tariffs. Travelers flitted between them. Molly stepped to one side as a train of squirrels ran by, parents and three kits all in fine white gloves and expensive leather boots still dripping with salted slush from the sidewalks outside, hustling to a gate from the rail exchange deep in the underlevels.
We will begin final departure procedures shortly, some airline's distant computer-voice announced.
She went to the bathroom and threw away her ID and boarding pass, took what was left of her cash to a newsstand for a Clarion and Scientific Mobian and to a Jimmy's for coffee and a sandwich. Then she walked until she found an empty gate for Polar Air without so much as a NEXT FLIGHT: announcement on the monitor, just WELCOME TO ROBOTROPOLIS! She settled down into one of the sixpack chairs to read and wait and watch for a fox about whom she knew only two things: he was wearing a red hat, and he was about to save her life.
"You're sure you don't want to sit down for a minute, Sonic?" Sally asked. They were getting close to Knothole, but how close she wasn't sure. The heavy snow she'd waited for would cover their tracks, but it was also hiding the way. "I mean, the doctor—"
"Hell, no, Sal," the dark hole in the middle of the stained parka's hood replied, glancing back at her through the flakes. "It's been weeks. You know the doc gave the hedgehog a grade-A bill of health."
"Technically, Sonic, the doctor said he was amazed you were alive."
"Yup, amazing, recovery, that's what he said. Amazing!" He raised his hands up in the air and Sally tensed—a somersault was asking to open his stitches—but for once the hedgehog himself seemed to think the better of it and return his gloves to his pockets. "All I really need right now is a little less snow, you know what I mean?"
"Yeah," Sally agreed, trying to dig her gloved hands deeper into the pockets of her jacket. But she needed a rest, too. And, to be honest, she wasn't entirely eager to arrive back at Knothole. Janet of Corey's restaurant said that no one had stopped by on their way back from Marigold. That might be because they had come directly through the forest. It might mean they were captured or dead out east. The bunker might even have been taken during Brushfire. Though, she reminded herself every twenty minutes or so, Mechanized Army did not know where it was, and the odds of someone just stumbling across it were next to nothing—
Sally's eyes squeezed tears against the whiteout as her shin kick into the rim of a stump. "Ah!" she cried as she slid down onto the rim. "Gods"
Sonic appeared next to her, giggling. "Nice work, Sally-girl."
She massaged her leg, appalled. "Sonic, it hurts—"
"No. I mean, we're here."
She blinked and looked around, but didn't see it. It was only when she actually found the old switch under a nearby rock and popped the hatch set into the false stump that she believed it. Sonic slid down the ladder without using the rungs; by the time she had her feet on the tiles he was already shaking out his parka, the stretch bandages hugging his ribcage pierced scattershot with quills and stained pink with draining lymph over the wound. "Rotor?" she called, lifting off her earmuffs. The air smelled, as always, of stainless steel ductwork; the only response was the buzz of the sputtering fluorescent tubes regularly spaced into the ceiling. "Antoine?"
"Hey TAILS!" Sonic bellowed, making the walls ring. He looked back at Sally with her burning ears plastered to her head, shrugged, then led on into the bunker.
The entryway was bare white tile like a clean room in a medical laboratory, unfriendly and sterile and empty. They ducked around the dead security emplacements (the circuits cut—even without ammo, it was disturbing to have a four foot minigun whirrclkclkclkclkclkclking at you whenever you came in from the outside), then went to the propped open EMERGENCY ACCESS door next to the dead elevators. Stairs seventy meters down the walls of a circular ventilation shaft, the depth marked with paint over the rusted emergency blast shield points (INJURY HAZARD – STAND CLEAR). And then the second door at the bottom (SURFACE ACCESS – EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY) and they were standing in one of Knothole's hallways. Soft carpet, impressionist paintings of the forest far above them lit to suggest windows that disappeared when you turned your head to look. A faint buzz of the lights, whirr of the air recirculators.
And that was it.
Sally traced the seam of her jacket to its pocket as though to pull out her gun but uneasily chose to just station her hand there, for the moment. She took the lead and Sonic followed. The conference rooms were empty. She tried the south corridor first, towards the mess—
"Aunt Sally!" Tails was leaning out of the hatch to the mess, his head a disaster of untended orange hair, his gloves peeling and filthy with dirt, his snout with the biggest smile she'd ever seen. "Uncle Sonic!" he yelled as she scooped him up on the run, hugging him, rushing with him into the noisy mess hall and that's when she saw it, queasy contrast of flopped ear and welded limbs, standing in the middle of the room like she owned the place, because she did own the place and Robotnik owned her, the thick, shiny punch press riveted into her left shoulder reaching out for Rotor, to squeeze and pierce his flesh—
"Aunt Sally?" Tails asked. He was crying.
She came off of autopilot squatting in a far corner of one of the conference rooms, clutching the fox kit to her chest, aiming her shivering, still cool gun over his shoulder at the distant door for the hopeless defense for when the personbot would come through it for them. There were sounds of screaming, tears, combat, death. It was as though they were pounding up to her eardrums from deep inside her as well as from without.
"Aright!" Sonic's voice cut through the din. "Everyone just shut up for a goddamn sec!"
Tails squirmed in her grip. "Are you alright, Sally?"
She just breathed, deep and sharp. Every breath gave the fox a crushing hug, every exhalation was a tiny scream.
From the photos on page fifty-five and fifty-six, it seemed that Bryson Air Motor, the infamous advertising boondoggle of Bryson Auto, had finally achieved some success. Incredibly expensive, impractical, ridiculous-looking success. The prototype, accompanied by a bundle of humans and mobians that had donned lab whites for the photographer, was a juice-sucking Wiley-Kleiner antigravitron drive dangling heavy black and red cables like a gigantic optic nerve, mounted in a spherical cassis strung with small subsidiary drives and compressed-air canons for maneuverability. The accompanying article indicated that Bryson was confident enough in their long dreamed-of flying car that negotiations were welcome from anyone with the money and nothing better to do with it.
Molly grinned. The pols were so ridiculous. Cold fusion cranks and antigrav losers installed hot, cold, and grant money nozzles in their showers, while the chemistry and materials science likely to actually pan out—dirt-cheap photovoltaics, room-temperature superconductors—languished by the wall, unsexy and unloved. There was at least some compensation: the sight of some superrich moron paying enough to feed a neighborhood for ten years so that he could float around in a ping-pong ball.
She tossed Scientic Mobian aside and stretched back with a wide, teeth-baring, tongue-curling yawn, reaching her arms so far onto the chair-backs on either side that the thick brown fur above her black wrists peeked from the sleeves of her jacket. It angered her, too, of course. You could say that it didn't matter whether you got your picture in the paper, and in fact she and Mark and Amilie and everyone else in MatSci at Gaumont pretty much did whenever they got the chance. But it's understood that you're just lying. And some raccoon woman raised in a war orphanage, plugging away in Tolsalvey eleven hours a day, plus work at the university, would only wind up making people a perfectly safe car. And you don't want to have to think about anyone else when you're enjoying your car. Just yourself—
Okay, be fair: the flying car was rock star science, and rock stars were rare even among people with relatives in Science Ministry. And the cold molds her team was working on—well, they could make really safe cars. Or they could make really light, mobile, well armored APCs for war ministry, which was where the grant money came from. Or, as Karena had bitterly surmised to Molly while reviewing the specs after last year's project review, they could make a next generation SWT series automated combat android; Swatbots that could storm a house without scratching the paint. This would resolve a terrible moral dilemma for Robotniks' security people, who lie awake every night after their order one of their particularly lethal bot-fronted arrests, especially one outside of the Port, thinking about all the terrible property damage they've just caused . . . .
Well, fine, then. Molly closed her black eyes and sighed, shoulder slumping like a clothesline, low as her grip on the chairbacks next to her would allow. Leave now, before things get even worse. Then she opened her eyes, because she had to keep watching. It was getting on to about eleven in the morning, and the terminal was getting thick with suits and young squirrels and foxes buried under heavy backpacks. Subdued suits of black and blue; brown and orange fur. Nothing red, yet.
She wished she didn't have to watch. She wanted a blindfold and wax in her ears, or a good solid knot to tie her to the mast. Scientific research was a patient, steady business. All matter is the same, wherever you find it (that's the assumption, anyway), so there's never any reason to go anywhere other than where you already are. Maybe that was the reason that unlike apparently everyone else on the planet she didn't dislike travel, or airports. Borgadan International looked sofestive: warm rose walls; wide, gently sloping corridors; nothing to do but wander from shop to shop, sit and wait, read and relax.
It wasn't real, of course; she had to remind herself of that. She only felt like this because she had effectively just quit her job and everything else along with it; this wasn't an actual day in Robotropolis. Hell, in a sense it wasn't even Robotropolis. The reconstruction of the civilian airport had been a bit of a cause célèbre around five years ago, when Robotnik's plants in the city government had been flailing about in the most desperate attempts to break the constant, low-level rioting that sat in the city like some dizzying, incurable fever. So it was a perfect, exact reproduction of the pre-War creation. Robotnik himself had opened the palace to heavily searched tours at the same time, another reconstruction.
Come enjoy the sites of yesteryear. It was a theme park, a pretty little playground for human tourists. MobiusLand. And if it seemed attractive compared to sleeping on a refugee association cot for a year or so while she tried to find some sort of job—Molly didn't have any illusions about what life would be like in Winstone or Hochteufel without so much as she knew a tail in the whole country with the same stripes—well, that was because MobiusLand was a lie. That Mobius, the one to which belonged the little, broken fragments slowly disappearing into the darkened corners of her mind, it was gone. It had been gone ever since her twelfth birthday just at the end of the war, the start of that long, hard-won peace, leaving those pastel memories on its way out.
It was the sort of thing you'd grown to expect over the past ten years, hitting a woman below the belt. And if it was true, that made it all the worse, if it could all be that way again, if—
Shut up, Dad, Molly, thought, digging her nails into the fake leather of the chairbacks, the stink of her own chestfur suddenly thick in her nostrils. Shut up and get the fuck out.
A coward wouldn't have lasted this long, Dad. What more could a thirteen year old raccoon have done, with the police already watching her right from the start, thanks Dad? When she, hell, when she was raised by the police? THANKS, DAD—
They were the ones who couldn't take it. Molly had to face up to what had happened to her; they were the cowards, didn't even have to hear the ultrasonic rocket that took out their barricade. Love your country more than your own daughter, you degenerate? Even a woman with nothing but selfish bastards after helpless drunks in her bed, at least she cared enough about the emptiness in her middle never to fill it—
Red hat.
Molly was taking long, nervous strides, hands empty, the last of her possessions behind her somewhere hive of small, uncomfortable chairs. She wiped at the damp fur of her mask, looked to the side to see if any airport security people were wondering why the halfcitizen raccoon had been crying don't do that, just follow the fox. Slow down, relax, okay, fake relax, move slow and steady. Let the suits see you coming and get out of your way; no collisions to keep you here. The long orange brush swung behind the short fox's baggy khakis like a battle standard leading the retreat, leading her on to safety, the white tip dancing around the travelers like a willow-the-wisp. Step, step, step . . . .
The tiny fox easily ducked to the side, somehow opening and slinking through an almost invisible employee door set into the pink walls, giving her eye contract for the first time as he made the move, a knowing, wicked little grin on his short, straight snout. Molly reproduced his motions perfectly. She felt nothing, just excitement, butterflies, trying to compose the letter in her head: Darcy, how can I possibly thank you enough? The door closed behind her; exit beautiful MobiusLand! into the ugly cogs and belts that kept the happy animatronic squirrels and running. It was actually a room with smooth eggshell walls suggesting one of the prewar space station, lights set deep into protected panels in the ceiling, nothing in the way of permanent furniture, just a steel gurney with a yellowfurred fox lying on it neck askew and wrong above an unbuttoned flannel shirt of blood plaid from dry red hole in his chest like the other one about an inch below his left ear, eyes a dried kernel of startle and fear.
Molly's hands felt behind her at a perfectly featureless, smooth white wall, fingers scrabbling for a doorhandle that wasn't there. The fox, the living one, slowed his quick pace to a lazy stroll as he turned about the corpse-bed and turned to her with that same jaded little smirk. He lifted the hat off of a head of jagged, short cut hair and tossed it onto the lap of the thing in the gurney. Then he hooked a finger inside one of the deep cargo pockets on his pants and fished forth a long, silvery line of lampcord. A bulge in the pocket awoke, rose, and emerged: a brassy six pointed badge. He flipped the cord back over his head, flashing her a little wink.
The tall feline that leaned against the wall behind him was dressed human-formally, a dark blue business suit and pants, but she had an almost identical badge in a little leather clasp hung on her vest pocket. The two humans stationed by the door next to her didn't have badges. They just had snubbarreled rifles and the green uniforms of the guards who worked the airport radsacanners.
"Lady," said the fox in a muted Corukas accent, "we need to talk."
"You're going to need to talk to her at some point," Rotor said. "She's beginning to open up to . . . well, Tails. And me too, a bit. But she knows that you're in charge. She needs to know that you're a friend." His heavy mouth opened and worked inarticulately, pulling into an uncertain grimace as he watched the reaction in her face. "Or not, that—you don't have to—she just needs to talk to you, okay?"
"Okay," Sally nodded rhythmically. But she was doing that constantly, fingers plastered to the sides of her skull and digging into her autumn hair as though they were the only things keeping her head from rolling off her neck.
"Some point soon," he added, uneagerly. "Bunnie's really frightened. She's trusted a lot of people that used her like a . . . wrench . . . uh, or . . . ." The walrus shrugged, sheepishly. "Something that gets used."
"O-ka-ay," Sally droned, gluing her chin to her chest over her crossed arms. With her knees up tight against her abdomen it was as though there were some sort of invisible egg sealing her away from the rest of the room, a little cocoon. Her snow-wet bangs hung to her snout at that angle, leaving her without eyes.
"Sally, I don't—" Rotor licked at his lips with a thick pink tongue, took a deep breath. "Sally, can you tell me what happened in Hewlett? I mean, more about it? I know you haven't wanted to go into details about the skunk, but now given that—"
At the word skunk Sally shook, like she was trying to crush herself, squeeze herself into nothing. "I need Sonic. Look, can you get Sonic?" she asked, grabbing a firmer hold of her vest. "Can you get Sonic to come here? Where the hell is he?"
"He's with Tails, calming Bunnie down. Are you—"
A single eye opened under the squirrels hair, staring like the barrel of a gun from a bunker. Bunnie is nice, Tails said. "Why is he with her? Get him. I need him—"
Sally drew a breath like a snake's hiss at the sudden heft of the fat, blubbery hand on the fur of her shoulder. A bit of uncertainty passed over the walrus's close-leaning face like a cloud before it returned to his usual sagging, kind smile. "You've got all of us, Sally. Sonic. Me, Antoine. Tails, everybody. You're ourPrincess. We'd give everything for you, Sally. We're with you to the end."
She gave a series of short, sharp nods, tension shivering out of her shoulder under his hand.
"And Bunnie's got only one friend, Sally. She knows he's her friend because he used anaesthesia before slitting her up. Why should she think different? All she has to do to know she doesn't deserve to be treated like normal people is to look down at her legs. She needs us to tell her different. And you . . . ." He took his hand from her shoulder and huffed down against the wall, kitty-corner from her. "I think you might know better than any of us what she's going through. That's another reason why she needs to talk to you, Sally. She needs to know that the things that happened to her . . . how they make a normal mobian feel. She needs to know that it would make any normal mobian sick."
Sally nodded softly, sniffing and rubbing her snout, and suddenly thought: oh my gods.
"I don't mean you need to talk to her right away. But she ought to meet you today, just to . . . . Sally?" Rotor asked, noticing the frozen stare, the calculations running behind her eyes. "Are you alright?"
"Any normal mobian," she echoed, rechecking her arithmetic. "Everyone. Everyone in this country who learned what happened to your rabbit would feel . . . fury. Rage."
Rotor nodded in slow, uneasy agreement: "She's not particularly myrabbit."
Not getting it.
"Rage," she added, "against Robotnik." She unfolded her arms, slipped one leg underneath the other. "That's who did it to her."
"It was Snively." Rotor remembered that Sally had not spent the last couple weeks hearing all about Snively and how thoughtful could be and how wonderful and relaxing it was to talk to him, so he sighed and added: "Snively Kolensky. But yeah. They're related; it's close—" He stopped as he got what a horrifying propaganda tool had slipped out of Robotnik's control, had just fallen right into his worst enemy's lap. "Close enough," he coughed.
"Who's doing it," Sally repeated, eyes straining against their sockets as though her skull couldn't hope to contain the idea that had just germinated within. "If there's two, there's ten."
"That's—"
"I need to talk to Bunnie now," Sally said, sitting up straight.
"Well, let's take it slow," Rotor said slowly, watching his princess warily. "I don't want to push her into something she's not ready for."
"I need," Sally repeated, "to talk to Bunnie now."
Rotor's eyes narrowed for a moment—an unnatural accompaniment to the balls of fat in each cheek, which quickly disappeared as his snout dropped into a slight frown. "Certainly, your Highness." He rolled away from her, onto his knees, then got slowly and heavily to his feet.
Sally put her hands to her hips and pressed her haunches forward, eased the stiffness from her shoulders and back. "But tell Sonic to get over here first," she called firmly as he walked from the door.
"Now this fellow, right here," said vulpine Robotropolis Police Officer Rawls, patting the corpse's forehead, "is what we call an escort. A people smuggler."
"Damn stupid escort," added National Police Detective Seale darkly, rubbing her chin whiskers, long and white against her deep gray fur. She had moved to lean against the wall behind the raccoon, no tie, each half of the unbuttoned collar to her white shirt twisted and warped. She looked like five bucks.
"Well, that's true," the dog fox allowed with a nod and a sympathetic glance at the foolish corpse. "Drawing down on Melanie Seale with nine millimeter pistol at the cab stand, that ain't smart. I got no idea how the dope thought he was gonna get the piece through security, either, so . . . you doin' okay, Miss Lotor?"
The airport guards had brought Molly an unpleasantly narrow metal chair that cut into her buttocks. Her left arm was cuffed to the seatback just below the thick brown fur above her wrist, and there wasn't a good gap for her ringtail, but what really bothered her about the chair was that it was composed of exactly the same cold steel as the gurney in front of her, that it was pointed so she could stare into the dead little seeds of the dead fox's eyes. She was gonna barf.
"Could I . . . could you take me to another room, maybe?" Molly asked quietly.
"Well." Officer Rawls sucked in his cheeks, twisting his smile in a parody of thought. "Well, you see the problem with that, Miss Lotor, is that there's no other place in this airport that's so, well . . . . Everywhere else in here you've got all these long hallways, all these emergency exits all over the place, and call me crazy, Molly, but—" He smiled at her inquiringly, though he knew the answer: "Can I call you that? Molly?"
"Wha—uh, okay." She swallowed. "Sure."
"Call me crazy, Molly, but I have this feeling like you're the sort of person who might try to run on me." The fox paced casually around the death bed, while behind Molly the panther kept her eyes on her Molly's free hand, her back against the hard white wall. The airport guys just stood there, like robots who didn't know anything horrible was going on until someone decided to tell them. Gods, she just needed to get out of here, she needed to think about what this all meant, what she could do—"That wouldn't be very smart, Molly." She looked up, blinking: gods, what had the fox been talking about? "I think we should probably just take care of our business in here," he concluded.
". . . . Okay," she agreed.
"Now what were we talking about, huh?" Rawls wondered. He shuffled through Molly's ID and cash cards—when they'd asked, she'd pointed them at the right bathroom trashcan. "Were we talking about the possibility of you getting death for destroying your IDs?"
"Huh?" asked Molly. Her brain wasn't working, everything gummed up by that dead fox, dead, dead . . . . "I'm—I didn't destroy it! I just—"
"Plus jumping the border without permission," the fox continued, pulling out her ID. "Yeah, here it is—provisional citizen status. That means for border jumping—hell, for pretty much anything above jaywalking, you go to Internal Security at Ironlock, and what happens once you're inside isn't any of my—"
"You were talking," Seale interrupted, "about the escort." She pointed, and the fox followed her finger to the dead man.
"Oh yeah!" Rawls turned to Molly, smiling. "See, this guy is an escort. He goes to the airport and picks up people his boss tells him to. But he's not the boss. We don't know who the boss is, because this guy here, he wasn't that smart. But if you're smart and you—"
"Oh shit," she said out loud. They're going to ask—don't tell them about—
"Who?" Seale was asking.
"Darcy," she said again.
"Soh-Bot-Kah?" asked Rawls, adjusting some little thing inside another one of those deep, innumerable pants pockets. Probably a microphone. Fuck it. Fuck everything. "She the boss?"
"She's my friend," Molly said quietly. "She helps me."
"Uh huh." Rawls nodded. "Spell that?"
"Ess-oh-bee . . . ." Molly grabbed the chair back with both hands and let her eyes close.
"Molly?" she heard Rawls say. "How do you spell it, Molly? Molly, are you alright? Do you want some water?—Fuck. Try S-O-B-O-T-K-A."
"Citizens database?" Molly heard the panther ask.
"Run immigration, too."
Molly tried to focus on her own breathing, leaning lower and lower in the chair. Fuck. Gods, her throat hurt so bad. It smelled like dead person in here. She was going to throw up. She was going to throw up all over herself.
"Oh, fuck yes," laughed the panther.
"What?" Molly raised her head to see the fox was practically jumping with each step as he came over, there was so much energy in his legs. "Wanted?" he asked eagerly. "I haven't seen her name on any alerts. You're telling me she's running the bodies five deep?"
"You wish," Seale smiled as she slunk past the fox, waving a little pocketcomp at him triumphantly. "Embassy. She's Lachels Embassy personnel."
"Well," said Rawls, and suddenly, the blood and mirth drained out of his face. "Diplomatic immunity." Seale nodded as she continued to walk away from him, thumbing more notes into her little comp. "You goddamn bitch!" The fox stomped over to her: "How thehell is a police supposed to make a living when every goddamn time I move up the ladder on one of these shithead traitors you have to lock me out of the room while you have a circle jerk with State Ministry? I swear to fucking Vidavin!"
Detective Seale pocketed her pocketcomp, then planted one hand firmly on the gurney. She lifted the other two her ear, pressed fingers to thumb, and played the world's smallest, quietest violin.
The panther didn't move as Rawls's stabbing finger came within centimeters of gouging her eye: "I got quotas, you bitch! You want I should give the Captain your number so he can ream you out at eleven o'clock at night when—"
"Excuse me?"
They both turned to look at the raccoon cuffed to the chair.
"What are you talking about?" Molly asked.
Rawls sighed, gestured vaguely at the green-uniformed humans still posed stiffly alongside the far door. "Christ, people, can't you see we're done here? Take care of it."
"What?" Molly asked more insistently. Then one of the guards made a circular motion above his head. He and the other spread out and her eyes went to the belt as they came forward and saw the cable ties for her wrists and ankles, the black muzzle for her snout, the black bag for her head—
Her tail whipped furiously in the air behind her, left and right, like some crazed venomous snake. Spit flew form her teeth as she swung and jabbed with the chair she was still cuffed to. The guards stepped carefully forward, pressing her closer to the wall. "No!" she growled. "No!"
"Can you people hurry it up?" said Detective Seale. "I need to get back to the office."