“That’s right, Ash. You can just breath a puff of nerve gas right in their ugly faces, can’t you? Show Emla your weapon loadout.”
He head-butted my shoulder, and I petted him while Emla read over the list. He had some smoke mixture to help with getaways, but mostly his little storage tanks were full of lethal agents. Swarms of microbots loaded with neurotoxins. A nasty strain of gray goo that would eat anyone who didn’t have milspec defenses. More microbots configured to spray tiny amounts of hyperacid into a victim’s eyes and nasal passages. None of it would do anything to a warbot, but he was a pretty lethal threat to street toughs.
“Nice,” Emla said. “Alright, I feel a little better about this now. So where are we going anyway?”
“Our first stop is Illustrious Imriel’s Exotic Imports, over on the far side of the Middle Tier.”
Kabana City was a huge settlement for something built on a planetary surface. It was a good six kilometers across, and the public maps showed four tiers of cityscape between the upper towers and the waterline. Each tier was about sixty meters tall, with its own layout of streets and plazas lined by buildings that were mostly about half that height. The rest of the space was used for weather management, and all the little tricks that created the illusion of being outdoors.
“I wonder what’s below the waterline?” Emla mused as we boarded a taxi. The little robotic groundcar rose silently onto its lift field, and glided off towards our destination.
“Barracks and training areas for the inugami,” I guessed. “Probably a lot of engineering spaces, too, and living quarters for the techs. I’m sure it takes a lot of people to keep a giant criminal empire running, plus the city is bound to need a crew. Did you notice how a lot of the Lower Tier is little clan compounds for low-status retainer clans? I bet the part you can see is just the tip of the iceberg, and they have lots more floors below decks.”
The important yakuza clans all lived at the top of the city, of course. There were a dozen towering clan homes that rose above the top of the city’s hull, giving a spectacular view of the surrounding sea. Although they were all designed to retract into the main body of the city if there was an attack, which had to be expensive. I guess it said something about how rich they were, or maybe just the size of their egos.
It was still early evening, and the district was bustling with pedestrians. Late shoppers, early club-goers and curious tourists mingled in the streets, most of which didn’t allow vehicles. The taxi dropped us off a couple of blocks from our destination, and from there we had to walk.
The crowds here were different than on Zanfeld. The spacers moved in pairs, or more often groups, and kept a sharper eye on their surroundings. A lot of them wore light armor, and carried much heavier weapons than my little pistol. Some of them looked so nervous I was sure it must be their first time on Taragi, and they were all really polite to each other.
The natives were easy to pick out, because they were a lot more relaxed. Still alert, but they knew the rules here and they were used to living with them. To them this was just another normal day.
I tried to copy them, and used our private datalink to pass Emla hints about how to act. I’m not sure how well it worked, though. There were so many interesting sights that it was hard not to gawk. Exotic visitors from distant ports, and odd stores selling all kinds of strange things.
Right next to Imriel’s Imports there was a shop that sold colorful little transforming robots, and a whole group of them posed and wrestled each other in the window display. The biggest ones were the size of Ash, but there were some so tiny they could have stood on the tip of my finger. It seemed like each one was different, and they were all based on something. Fictional giant robots from ancient vidshows, or real ones from sports like Mechbattlers or Big Iron.
I made a note to look up those shows when I had the chance, and reluctantly passed it by to check out Imriel’s instead. Unfortunately that turned out to be a disappointment. At first glance it looked like a store full of traditional Japanese cultural artifacts, but it was obvious to me that it was all cheap junk. Hundreds of square meters of shelf space crammed full of generic tea, random snack foods, ‘handcrafted’ curios that had obviously come out of a bulk fabricator, and ‘lacquered wood’ utensils that weren’t even made of real wood. Ugh. Did people really fall for that?
“I can’t tell the difference, Alice,” Emla commented as I pulled her out of the store. “Does it really matter if the wood is real or not?”
I rolled my eyes.
“The whole point of this snooty cultural stuff is showing people that you can tell when something is authentic,” I told her. “Besides, I’m not talking about quick-grown synthetic wood like you’d get from a biofab. You’re right, that stuff’s actually better than handcrafted hardwood on any practical level. But most of the stuff in there is just low-grade structural matter with different color patterns printed on the surface. It isn’t going to handle like the real thing, and it’ll all fall apart after a few weeks of use.”
“Oh. I guess that wouldn’t impress him much, huh?”
“He’d probably have me executed for the insult. Come on, maybe we’ll have better luck at Timeless Traditions.”
We didn’t.
It took me a couple of hours to realize that most of the shops in the Middle Tier were tourist traps. I guess the fact that so many of them specialized in stuff like subtle murder weapons, mind control devices and illegal spy gear threw off my expectations. But after the third shop turned out to be worthless I spent a few minutes poking my head into the other shops along the street, and found more of the same.
Great. From their datanet sites it looked like the Upper Tier shops were all very traditional Masu-kai places, so they weren’t going to have the kind of thing I was looking for. The High Tier was reserved for rich customers with special passes, so that left me with the Lower Tier.
Where the really nasty stuff was supposed to be.
“Do we really need to do this?” Emla asked quietly as I led her into an elevator.
“Yes. I have to make a good impression here, Emla.”
She sighed. “Alright. But if we end up captured by slavers I reserve the right to say I told you so.”
“If we get captured by slavers we’ll be too busy escaping for complaints. We’ll be fine, Emla. Just act natural, and keep your eyes open.”
The elevator doors opened, and a bunch of huge guys trooped in. They were all well over two hundred cems, with bulging muscles and green skin. Orcs?