The barn door was missing, light spilling out. This was not normal. Mr. Tod snapped alert. Danger thrummed in the very air, as when the baying of a pack of hounds was heard.
Cautiously, Mr. Tod poked his pointy nose around the empty doorframe.
McGregor stood above a rabbit in a net. The rabbit was gasping for breath and retching.
As Mr. Tod watched, the splice named Flopsy made a move toward McGregor, who swiveled his gun toward her.
"You too?" said the man.
Flopsy halted. "You may stop us today, but you won't hold us forever. The end of your rule is coming. There is a place where splices live free-"
Mr. Tod listened unbelievingly. Not privy to the whispered nightly rumors exchanged among the barn-dwellers, he had never heard of such a thing. Could it be true? There was the presence of the bound rabbit to consider. Wait, was he the old Peter?
McGregor silenced Flopsy with a backhand across her muzzle, rocking her on her big feet.
"Anyone else have something to say?" he demanded.
The splices all looked at the floor. McGregor laid down his gun. One of Peter's ears, the left, protruded from the net. McGregor grabbed it and effortlessly lifted Peter up to his feet.
"I've been waiting a long time for this-"
Peter had managed to regain his breath. Mustering all his strength, he spat now into McGregor's face.
"Eat your own pellets, proke!"
McGregor howled and closed his hands on Peter's neck.
Something snapped in Mr. Tod.
He launched himself across the distance separating him from the struggle.
The impact of Mr. Tod on the man shattered his chokehold and knocked him to the floor.
Mr. Tod scrambled atop McGregor.
"What– " was all McGregor had time to utter.
Then Mr. Tod fastened his teeth in McGregor's reinforced throat.
Roaring, McGregor reflexively began to throttle the fox.
Mr. Tod did not let go. Though all grew black, though the sound of some celestial hunter's horn filled his ears, his powerful jaws remained fastened tightly until he was dead.
But by then, so was McGregor.
7. Cecily Parsley's Nursery Rhymes
Mrs. Tiggywinkle freed Peter with her pinking shears. He surprised himself by being able to stand on his own.
His throat felt like he had smoked a pack of fags in five minutes. His left ear throbbed. When he had fallen, his pistol had gouged him. Yet he had never felt better.
Regarding the pair of corpses at his feet, Peter sensed words swelling up unbidden in him.
"In the end, Tod was no quisling, but a true splice. And if man has stripped us of our birthright, he has also showed us the commonality of our lot. Fox saves rabbit, cat helps mouse, the lion lies down with the lamb. Tod's death was not the first, nor will it be the last. But without our further actions, it could be in vain. Come, we must flee."
Outside, as the splices gathered 'round him, looking nervously at the world that awaited them, Peter removed a letterbomb from his coat.
He threw the capsule at the barn.
Shattering and splattering the wall, the intelligent silicrobe paint formed a departing message from the CLF.
We have a little garden, A garden of our own, And every day we water there The seeds that we have sown.
Brain Wars
Dear Host Mother,
The invasion is over, and I'm fine. Safe as a blastula in a bioreactor, in fact, here inside our risk bubble.
Which is more than I can say for the enemy, Mom. We pretty much turned them into sodai gomi in less time than it takes to flip a SQUID.
I'm really sorry I can't raster you face-to-face or virt you in Candyland and see you smile at the good news. I can almost picture you nictitating that way you do when you're happy. But for reasons of security, us zygotes (that's just a friendly term the officers have for noncoms) don't have full access to the metamedium. We've been stripped of all our telltags and poqetpals, most of us for the first time in our lives. I feel plumb naked! We're limited to this retro-jethro Teleport
bonovox line, I guess so no live Si-viruses or GaAs-worms can slip in or out. And in fact, all these sending units have a TL1 AI chip in them that will automatically erase any critical information from the transmission. Like for instance, if I were to try to tell you that we're stationed just north of CENSORED, or that our KIA's amounted to CENSORED, the machine would simply blip that part right out.
Works out just as well as the metamedium, I guess, what with CENSORED time zones between us and all.
Anyway, the important thing is that our mission seems to be a big success. Once again, the IMF has managed to intervene just in time to stop a potential catastrophe.
I'll tell you more in a while. But right now my main proxy, Penguin, is calling me. Seems we have to use the simorg colony to evolve some new expert modules they need by yesterday!
Your loving guest-son, CENSORED
Dear Host Mother,
What a jangle-tangle! The brass-skulls and swellheads stopped by with a crew of noahs from the GEF wanting to evaluate the oceanic/atmospheric contamination produced by this latest Short War, and Penguin and I were kept busy bending molecules during what should have been our downtime. (At least one of the noahs, a Xuly Beth Vollbracht, was nice enough to bring along a dose of recreational tropes to share with us.) Anyhow, they finally finished with us, and since Penguin wanted to go offline for a while, I thought I'd pick up my transmission to you where I left off.
Now, I know you and I have had our disagreements about the IMF's policies. Why, sometimes you actually sounded like a rifkin or greenpeacer! I can remember you saying, ''I never got to vote for the World Bank board." But we all got to vote for the politicians who voted for them, whether we hailed from a big polypax like the NU or the EC, or a little one like our own McMurdo, so we can't really blame anyone else when the IMF does something we don't particularly like. I'm thinking of the mess they made in what used to be Yongbyon-the "Pyongyang Gang Bang" I remember you called it-and the way they handled (or mishandled) those renegade cricks and transgenics hiding out in the Azores. The Atlantic will recover faster from that one than the IMF's reputation will!
But those incidents took place before I joined, which you'll recall was right after the big command shakeup. My own unit was purged of all its officers, and Oberjefe Ozal received a field promotion, which he still holds. I think you'd like Ozal, he's a smart, goodlooking probe-the NYC gals in our pod all call him a "streetbeat gamete," which I guess is some kind of compliment-but he's not conceited. His main philofix is music. He plays his qawwali tabs whenever he has a spare moment-mostly thru earwigs, since no one else really enjoys the holy Slammer wailing.
Anyhow, I can't say I feel any personal responsibility for any of the IMF's previous goo-screwing cockups (pardon the language), and nothing I've taken part in since I signed up has led me to regret my decision.
I've got to cut this short now, since one of my proxies is waiting to use the 'vox unit. I'll be right back.
Your loving guest-son, CENSORED