Eric Flint: Rats, Bats and Vats

A flash of Chip's headlight showed him a rat with a daft pince-nez made of scrap wire perched on his long nose, also digging. That was the weird Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. That rat proved sanity was not necessary for survival.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich was a soft-cyber experiment who had been drafted in when things got dire. Somebody had told Chip that Doc had been the product of load-tolerance tests on the vocabulary unit ROM of the alien-built cybernetic enhancement chips. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich had gotten a download of the whole of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic into his ratty brain, along with a mass of other philosophical claptrap.

The result: the loony medic seemed to think he was a rat reincarnation of Georg W. F. Hegel. A reincarnation, mind you, in the body of a genetically engineered creature the size of a small cat, built on the genetic blueprint of an elephant shrew, with add-ons from real shrews and rats. Yes. Crazy. Chip thought it came of having alien hardware in their heads.

At least the rest of the rats in his unit had just gotten downloaded with Shakespeare plays, Gilbert and Sullivan and, for no reason Chip could imagine, a reading of Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday. Of course, ratty nature saw to it that they identified with the lowlifes and not the heroes, even in blasted Shakespeare. No Hamlets and King Lears here! But plenty of rogues and merry wives. As Fal said: they had been at a great feast of languages and stolen the scraps.

Fortunately the language units only picked out words from the material for the speech synthesizers. But the occasional phrases popped up, too. Usually, the rats being what they were, insults.

Chip shook his head. Musing about rat-language at a time like this? He knew, deep inside, it was because he didn't want to think about something else. Still, there was a chance, a desperately small chance… He got up, and started pulling fallen material aside himself. He worked as fast as he could. There might still be survivors. Their personal slowshields would stop sudden impact, but couldn't resist the slow, steady pressure.

But, for all the haste with which they worked, and the badinage, Chip and his companions were alert. There was always a chance they'd dig up a live Maggot too.

"What about sober and a virgin?" said Chip to the tail end of the burrowing Fal, as he lifted a beam to allow Nym to get in to the next section. The only human they'd seen so far-the lieutenant-hadn't been alive. But Chip hadn't been looking for him anyway.

"You're as bad as these other useless rowdy, lecherous drunks," said Melene, one of the three surviving rat-girls. She was also digging. It sounded as if she approved of lecherous drunks.

Chip managed a decent grin. He wasn't really in the mood for this, but he'd learned how to get along with the rats. "Just a lot more expensive to get drunk so that you can have your wicked way with me, Mel."

This provoked a snort-of amusement from the rats and disgust from the bats. "I' faith, when it comes to drinking, Fat Fal will give you a run for your money," said Doll, reputed to be the baddest rat-girl in the army. She would know.

"Fal?" demanded Chip. "Run for my money? Run! Fal! Come on! Be reasonable. He gets exhausted picking his teeth."

"Listen…" snapped one of the bats. "They're coming. Quiet!"

There was silence. Chip's less-than-cybershrew- or batborg-keen ears could hear nothing. Yet obviously, the others could. After a few seconds it came, at first a faint whisper, then growing and growing. Arthropod clicking. The sound of myriad upon myriad Maggot clawfeet, passing right above them. If they made any noise now, the Maggot-diggers would come through the roof. All they could do was wait, knowing that their comrades might possibly still be alive under the debris. Knowing too that, with each passing moment, the chances for any buried friends diminished.

Eric Flint

Rats, Bats amp; Vats

Chapter 2:

Really under enemy attack.

THE TRAMP-SCRITCH-TRAMP went on and on for hours. They were plainly right underneath a big Magh' push.

Trapped.

Chip could do nothing but sit in the darkness, conserving his torch power pack. He thought of sun and light and air. He couldn't help but think of the dead. Friends. Comrades-in-arms. And…

Dermott. Damn!

Here he was, as far as he knew the last surviving human in this hole. If he had to be honest with himself, Chip knew that they had no chance of getting out of here. It was a thought you pushed aside or you cracked up. He'd had to push aside the memory of death and the hope of survival so many times. After all, he'd been a conscript for seven months now. It felt like seven years. In this war he was a combat veteran. A conscript's lifespan in the front lines was usually less than three weeks.

Buddies were close, and yet… you kept your distance. You didn't want to get too close. Still, this time… he'd like to see another live human face. Dermott's, especially, but any human would be better than none. If push came to shove, Chip would even settle for a goddamn officer. Even if the alien soft-cyber enhanced rats and bats, with all their goofy attitudes and ideas, were still more his kind of folk than those sons-of-Shareholders were, he'd still like to see a living human again…

Hell, he might as well wish for one with an hourglass figure too. And a few beers. A steak as thick as both his thumbs… Huh. He was getting more like one of the damn rats by the day.

The air was hot and stale in this hole. But at least the noises from above had begun to change.

"They're building." The low bat-whisper was the first thing besides Maggot susurration and his own quiet breathing and heartbeat that Chip had heard for hours now. He recognized Bronstein's voice easily enough. Despite the generic similarity of all the voices produced by the synthesizers, each rat and bat still managed to maintain a distinctive tone.

Chip ground his teeth. Maggot tunnels above them! Maggot tunnels could be miles wide and five hundred yards high. "Look, we've got to get out of here. We're gonna run out of air and suffocate soon anyway."

"We'd be foine if it wasn't for the primate using two-thirds of the oxygen," grumbled a bat. That was Behan, surly as usual. "Still, we should be able to start diggin' out now. Those builder-digger Maggots are really stupid. When I was in that mole in Operation Zemlya, we popped out right next to them. All they did was stand around and get butchered."

"When who starts digging?" sneered Fal. "You damn flyboys can't dig." The rat heaved his corpulent form upright. "Who does all the work around here, and why do we, hey, flyboy glamour-puss?"

"Work! 'Tis ignorant of the concept you rats are!" snapped the big male bat. He called himself Eamon Jugash… something or other. Chip couldn't remember. Or see the point. Bats didn't really have decent jugs, after all.

But that was bats for you. Bats always chose mile-long pretentious names for themselves, to replace their official Society-issued numbers. What Chip principally remembered about this one was that Big Dermott had said that that particular bat was trouble. He would tell her The realization hit him like a sledgehammer. He wasn't going to be telling Dermott anything. She was dead for sure, by now.

He was a bit shocked at how hard that knowledge hit him. It wasn't as if Dermott had had a dazzling personality or been any kind of a beauty queen. Not too bright, really, with a broad Vat face on a big workhorse body. But a nice girl all the same. A very nice girl. A girl with a dream… One more indebted conscript the Company wouldn't be collecting from.

Still, he had to make sure. Maybe He got up and began digging into the rubble.

"You're not going to get out that way, Connolly," said Siobhan.