Green City Wars

In a future where humanity has built ecologically sustainable "green cities," the infrastructure of these metropolises is secretly maintained by Gehirner, genetically engineered service animals with speech, dexterous hands, and augmented intelligence. They live hidden behind the walls and beneath the streets, bound by Rule One: the prohibition against coming to the attention of humans. Their intelligence depends on regular doses of Plangent, a neurological supplement without which they revert to non-sapient animals, a condition called maulkrankeit. In the Austrian green city of Neuwien-Grunstadt, a complex underground society of guilds, armies, crime families, and freelancers has emerged among these animals, none of it anticipated by the humans who designed them.

Skotch, a raccoon who once worked for the American corporation Uzco, scrapes by as a freelance investigator. He wakes in his nook in the rootways, the hidden tunnels beneath the city, running dangerously low on Plangent. Before he can secure work elsewhere, Uzco enforcers escort him to company headquarters, where Benson, a long-lived snapping turtle who manages Uzco's Gehirner operations, pressures Skotch into a job: find Doctor Meece, a fugitive mouse scientist who has fled the Farm Projects, the heavily controlled agricultural facilities outside the city. Benson offers Plangent ampoules and company credit, a sum Skotch cannot refuse.

Skotch visits Sly, a fox who lost both front legs in military service and runs a dog-based intelligence network. Sly locates Meece in the active war zone between the Graycoat and Redcoat squirrel armies and warns that multiple parties are hunting the mouse. At a secondary workspace, Skotch is ambushed by Szerky, a stoatweasel assassin and warrior-elite enforcer from the Country Clubs, the associations that run the Farm Projects. Szerky warns him away, hints that Meece possesses dangerous knowledge, and offers the farms' resources if Skotch delivers the mouse to her instead. Her presence reveals that someone inside Uzco is leaking information.

Calling in his last favor with Springer, a scarred Graycoat quartermaster, Skotch gains access to contested territory and discovers a concealed laboratory where Meece has been working. When a battle erupts, Skotch chases Meece across a restaurant floor. Szerky ambushes the mouse, but Skotch tackles her. Szerky fires her bee gun, a weapon that shoots weaponized stingers, and Springer takes three to the chest, dying of anaphylactic shock in Skotch's arms. A parrot snatches Meece and delivers him to the Maulers, anarchist revolutionaries who escape with the mouse.

To reach the Maulers, Skotch visits Saint Frances' Chapel, a flooded underground space where a human nun ministers to Gehirner, breaking Rule One. Lulu, a talkative pigeon who gathers information for Schreiber, a human novelist, attaches herself to Skotch's investigation. Before Skotch can follow up, Mother Murnau's gang abducts him and Lulu. Mother Murnau, an eight-year-old rat kept alive by stolen medical technology, wants Meece alive. She produces Tybelle, an augmented pet cat. Because cats have human owners, Tybelle is protected by Rule One, making her a nearly untouchable killer for hire. Tybelle threatens Lulu, but Lulu's metal ring, signifying her relationship with Schreiber, saves her: Killing the novelist's pigeon would attract dangerous human scrutiny.

Skotch returns home to find his Uzco colleague Fitch murdered. Benson now accepts Meece dead or alive and assigns Maria, a grieving possum, as Skotch's minder. Slipping away from Maria, Skotch reaches the Mauler hideout in Madparrot Alley. Their leader Wizzo, a rat clockmaker, lets Skotch try to persuade Meece. The mouse refuses to explain his work but speaks cryptically about leveling the playing field between Gehirner and humans. When Tybelle infiltrates the hideout, Skotch grabs Meece and flees, directing the mouse to hide in the sealed shell of the deceased Ikelos of Santorini, a tortoise whose death Skotch has secretly concealed.

Following Sly's intelligence, Skotch visits the Baron of Waste Sector Three, a massive frog who oversees the city's underground water purification. The Baron reveals that Meece independently devised 19 innovations for her operations and describes him as an irreplaceable prodigy. When Skotch returns to Sly, the Country Clubs have already struck, hiring Graycoats to storm the den. Sly lies mortally wounded, his dying words an instruction to save the mouse. Szerky has orchestrated the attack. Skotch surrenders.

The coalition of hunters brings Skotch to the Separation Plant, the facility where dead Gehirner are ground into food, and demands Meece's location. He refuses. Lulu alerts the Redcoat army, and in the ensuing battle, Maria breaks from Uzco to attack Szerky. Lulu takes a popgun bolt to the wing while shielding Skotch's escape. Skotch nearly succumbs to Plangent deprivation before the Reds dose him and take custody. The Reds sell both prisoners to Ratlabs, an independent rat-run scientific guild. Nimoy, a silver-furred rat scientist with a metal cranium plate and glass eye, deduces that Skotch hid Meece in Ikelos' shell. She offers Plangent and medical care for Lulu as goodwill. When Skotch discovers Ratlabs allied with the Rattenkönige, the city's rat crime families, he takes Lulu and flees.

Breaking Rule One, Skotch rides the human tram system to reach Saint Frances. He then meets Benson and his friend Shojen, an employee of the foreign corporation HengZeico, at the Bärenhaus, a public Gehirner dining hall. Both corporations refuse to shelter Meece. Maria warns Skotch that Benson plans to have him killed once the situation resolves. She acts from rage: Szerky has paid the mausgelt, the system-mandated price for killing a Gehirner, for Fitch's murder, and Benson has accepted it.

Skotch contacts Meece via a secure line. The mouse reveals his secret: He has developed a formula to manufacture Plangent cheaply and independently, with effects lasting tenfold longer. Universal free Plangent would eliminate the fundamental mechanism of control over Gehirner lives. Skotch decides to support Meece.

Skotch returns to collect the mouse, but Szerky has followed him. She forces open Ikelos' shell to find it empty: Tybelle has already smuggled the mouse out, disguising him as one of her Kit Kat Cultists, small robed rodents who follow the cat. Working for Murnau, Tybelle spirited Meece away. As Szerky and Tybelle fight, Skotch flees with the cultists and the hidden Meece. After a desperate flight through army-controlled streets, they reach the Chapel, where an ad hoc alliance of Maulers, Ratlabs technicians, Tybelle, the Baron's newt commandos, Maria, and others assembles. Meece works frantically to record the complete Plangent formula from memory onto a device Nimoy provides. The Country Clubs have used their influence to summon Saint Frances away, stripping the Chapel of its protection.

Szerky arrives with both squirrel armies, bought with Country Club money. The battle erupts. The defenders deploy underwater ambushes, sonic weapons, and false-flag aerial attacks that trick the rival armies into fighting each other. Wizzo dies detonating improvised grenades. Maria catches Szerky from behind, but Szerky kills her. The stoatweasel breaks through to Meece, and only Lulu, body-blocking her rush, delays the strike. Then Schreiber, summoned by Saint Frances' earlier call, enters the Chapel. His enormous human presence triggers instinctive paralysis in every Gehirner. Squirrels drop their guns. Szerky freezes. Schreiber kneels and picks up Lulu, who has already taken Meece's device. Using Schreiber's communication technology, Lulu transmits the formula across the Gehirner world. Tybelle pounces on the paralyzed Szerky and snaps her neck.

Meece's formula spreads rapidly. Cheap, long-lasting Plangent floods Neuwien-Grunstadt, produced so abundantly that it becomes worthless as a commodity and invaluable as liberation. The threat of cognitive decline, the fundamental lever of control, is removed from Gehirner life. The work continues, but without the desperation that accompanied scarcity. Benson acknowledges that Uzco will adapt. Skotch scores a freelance job with HengZeico and heads off to have lunch with Lulu, who survived her injuries. He owes her a story, and he finally has a good one to tell.