“Gotta find my pack. It’s got my grog in it!” hissed fat Fal, digging frantically. “Damn near a full bottle too.”
Two of the other rats hastily got up to join him.
“Oh, aye, that’s right,” said a bat sarcastically. O’Niel, that was. “Bring the rest of the roof down on all of us in your mad search for the daemon drink.”
Fal, the paunchy rat, simply grubbed harder. “It’s dig or die sober,” he said with grim humor. “Besides, I might find someone. Maybe a grateful bit of tail.”
“Yep. Only one thing worse than dying sober. That would be to die a virgin,” said his villainous one-eyed companion, Pistol, nimbly jumping clear of a cascade of earth.
“Ha, Pistol, as if your puissant pike ever found a rat maiden that had despaired of winning a rat’s affection . . .”
“What we observe here is the moral quandary inherent in the empiricist approach to—”
“Oh, put a sock in it, Doc,” Pistol said.
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.