I just knew I was red as a tomato.
“What could be so embarrassing about a fabricator that makes hardware backups?” Naoko asked cluelessly.
Chief West looked mystified too. Captain Sokol took in my expression, and gave me a sympathetic look.
“Eggs?”
I nodded and looked away, mortified.
“Ahem. Yes, well, as the capability is not yet available, there’s no need to discuss the matter further.”
Thankfully, the others let it drop. Crash, Mom, what were you thinking? Yeah, being able to survive getting killed would be nice. But laying eggs that can hatch into another me? What kind of weirdo comes up with stuff like that?
I resolutely ignored the little voice pointing out that it was the obvious design, since I needed a fancy fabricator down there anyway if I wanted to be able to have babies that were like me. No, that feature was obviously designed by a man. Wait, no, that was even more embarrassing to think about. Shut up, Alice. Stop thinking about some group of engineers having meetings to talk about the design of your private parts. Just listen to the captain.
“We will remain on the ship until I receive confirmation of my appointment,” he was saying. “That will likely take several hours, perhaps even a day or two if the oyabun is busy. Once we know when we are expected we will take the Speedy Exit down, and time our arrival so that we are not left at loose ends for any great length of time.
“Chief West will be in charge of security for the mission, obviously. The customs of the Masu-kai allow human petitioners to be accompanied by a bodyguard, and he will be filling that role for me. Unfortunately it would be rude to appear in powered armor accompanied by warbots, so we shall have to be rather low-key in our choice of equipment. I recommend attractive but tasteful clothing and sidearms for both of you.”
“Could I bring Emla as my bodyguard, sir?” I asked.
He seemed surprised at the suggestion, but after a moment of thought he nodded. “Yes, Alice, you could do that if you wish. Bringing your own bodyguard would imply a certain separation between yourself and the Square Deal, emphasized by the brevity of our association. If matters go badly for the ship you might escape repercussions, so long as you are respectful in all of your own interactions with the Masu-kai.”
“Is she really up to that job, though?” Chief West put in. “I could set you up with a pretty good security bot. Humanoid chassis, class two AI and as much firepower as you can fit into something that looks human.”
“Emla’s new body is a lot better than anything normal,” I told him. “She’s tougher than a breeching bot, and better armed too. Not to mention that she’s a class four. I’d rather have a loyal friend at my back than a bot any day.”
“Well, if you’re sure,” he said dubiously.
“Simply having an obvious protector will deter most threats,” Captain Sokol said. “As your bodyguard she may wear armor, but I’d suggest something lightweight. Now, here’s how the audience will go.”
He walked us all through the etiquette of visiting the court of the Masu-kai, which was a lot more complicated than I would have expected. Thugs and criminals aren’t usually known for their smooth social graces, but these guys were different. They could trace their origins all the way back to pre-space Japan, and they considered themselves some kind of nobility. Not that anyone else took their pretensions seriously, but when you’re visiting a crime lord’s palace you’d better address him by whatever title he tells you to.
Something about the way these yakuza aped the customs of their betters really grated on me at first, until I asked what the basis of their claim was.
“Oh, they have quite an elaborate mythology about their clan history. I’m afraid we lack the time to discuss it at the moment, but I believe I still have a copy of the data. Ah, yes. Here, you may find it interesting.”
He sent me a link to a collection of data files, which I found were an assortment of history books published over a span of two hundred years. The earliest ones had a few chapters documenting the flight of several families of wealthy industrialists from Old Earth during the Kaiju War, and their subsequent efforts to smuggle survivors out of Japan under the noses of their foreign conquerors. The later ones covered their attempts to make a new home in space, and how their descendants had eventually ended up running a major crime syndicate in the Outer Sphere. It was a long and sordid tale, but it was the genealogy behind their claim to nobility that got my attention.
They had rescued a daughter of the Imperial family during the occupation? Yes, and years later she’d given up on finding another survivor of the Imperial line and married one of her rescuers. The current Oyabun and his family were all ultimately descended from her.
Noble yakuza. I was incensed. What did they think they were doing, sullying the Imperial bloodline with such a base profession? They should have built a new kingdom to rule! Or just taken over one of the Japanese colonies that were dotted all over human space. If they’d done something like that instead of running off to the Deep Black like a bunch of cowards they might even have found one of the other branches of the Imperial family that survived Earth’s first collapse, and reunited poor Rika with her clan.
I realized I was a heartbeat away from going on a rant, and stopped to take a deep breath. Why was this affecting me so much? Why did I care what some ragged band of survivors from a long-dead nation did with themselves?
Why did it feel like I already knew most of what Captain Sokol was telling us about Masu-kai customs?
Okay, obviously there must be some Japanese cultural data stuffed away in the darker corners of my subconscious. That was one of my native languages, too. So, maybe Mom was from a Japanese colony? It seemed to fit. Mom had looked kind of Japanese, even if she did have a Western name. She’d been all slender and elegant, like upper-class Japanese women are supposed to be. I could easily grow up to look like that too.
This was the best clue I’d gotten in years. Of course, that didn’t narrow it down much. Xenopedia had listings for thousands of ethnic Japanese colonies all over known space. But it was something. I filed it away for later, and focused my attention back on the captain’s explanations.
It ended up taking a long time for the oyabun’s office to respond to Captain Sokol’s request. I did my best to keep busy with preparations, so I wouldn’t end up sitting around worrying the whole time. Emla was thrilled that I wanted her with me on a dangerous mission, and immediately started shopping for armor options.
“What can we afford, Alice?” She asked eagerly, already scanning through the ship’s design databases.
Ash perched on her shoulder, peering at the illustrations of different powered armor designs. He pointed at a suit that mounted a massive anti-armor cannon, and burbled excitedly.
Maximum penetration!
I chuckled, and scratched his chin. “Let’s not get carried away, here. The ship is paying for this one, so cost doesn’t matter as long as the materials are in stock. But you’re supposed to be guarding me against muggers and assassins, not our host. If you armor up too much he could take it as an insult.”
Mmm, scritches, Ash crooned. Silly little guy.
“I understand, Alice. Don’t worry, I know how to do this job. Strange Loop Sleuth gave me a bunch of skill packs, and one of them was a guide to being a high class bodyguard. I won’t embarrass you. What are you going to wear?”
“I have no idea,” I realized.
“Call Kara. She’ll be glad to help you figure it out.”
“Good idea.”
Sure enough, Kara eagerly volunteered to help me with an outfit. Her clothing database made the ship’s look puny in comparison, but more importantly she knew how to create a look. We tried out a few variations on the tough cutie thing I’d gone with for the club, but for this trip she wasn’t satisfied with that.
“You don’t want to look like a lamb when you’re surrounded by wolves,” she explained. “Just suggesting that you can fight isn’t going to
be enough in this place. We need something that will make people think twice about trying to take advantage of you. Here, let’s see if you can pull off elegant.”
Her first stab at that made me look like a little kid wearing her mom’s clothes, and the next was way too revealing for me. I would have given up there, but she just got a thoughtful look and picked out another outfit.
This time I gasped when I saw myself in the mirror. The dress was black silk, with clean lines and a much longer skirt than I was used to. I’d expected it to look frumpy, but somehow the effect was just the opposite. I looked years older. Not sexy, exactly, but really pretty.
“Put these on,” Kara advised, handing me a gold bracelet and earrings. “Then walk like you’re in the middle of a martial arts fight.”
I put the jewelry on. “What do you mean, like I’m in a fight?”
“You know, that magic perfect balance glide thing you do.”
“What, like this?”
She grinned at me. “Perfect! Now do it again, and watch yourself in the mirror.”
I did a little spin and glided back across the room. With the long skirt it almost looked like I was floating.
“Oh, yeah. You can definitely pull off an elegant look. Put a little sway in your walk. Not that much. Yeah, there you go. You look like a young princess dressed for a ball, Alice. This will get you some respect. Let’s try it in a darker blue.”
We went through six more dresses, and most of them looked pretty good on me. I still couldn’t pass as an adult, of course. But dressing like this made me look like the kid of someone important, instead of a poor orphan girl. With light colors and a slight widening of my eyes I could look really innocent and charming. With darker colors the innocence bled away, and a colder expression created an impression of some domineering autocrat’s daughter.
“Off with their heads,” I sneered at the mirror. Kara giggled, and I couldn’t hold the expression. But my smile didn’t spoil the effect. I still looked like a refined young lady sharing a moment of amusement, instead of a giggling kid.
“You’re a miracle worker, Kara,” I told her. “This is perfect. Let’s get the real version fabbed up.”
“Aw, but I was going to try out some space Nazi styles next,” she protested. “Don’t you want to see what you’d look like as an evil princess?”
I rolled my eyes. “You’d never get the details right. Didn’t they have some kind of crazy sentient nanomorph clothing material, and shapeshifting crowns?”
“Did they? Well, it was just a thought. You know, if you’re meeting with scary yakuza bosses why not look like someone even scarier?”
“Are you nuts? They’d probably murder me on general principles! Why would you think that was a good idea?”
“Hey, Mina got all the common sense. I just know how to look good, and trust me, you’d look great in one of those sinister black uniform dresses.”
“Gee, thanks. I think I’ll just stick with the executive heiress look, if you don’t mind.”
The com pinged me with a notification. The oyabun had agreed to meet with us, and we had a time slot for our audience.
“Uh, oh. Only ninety minutes until I have to leave, Kara. Can we make that?”
She nodded. “If we work fast. Alright, I’ve got your dress building. What do you want in your jewelry? I guess you don’t need sensors or com gear, but that still leaves a lot of options. Explosives, com jammers, microbots dispensers. My spy gear is a little dated these days, but a lot of the designs will still get the job done.”
“Spy gear? You know, Kara, one of these days I’ve got to get you to tell me the real reason you girls have that kind of thing. I’ve heard three different versions of your secret past now, and none of them agree with each other.”
She grinned at me. “See why we want you to sign up with an agitprop service? It works. You know there’s some kind of story, but you’ll never really know which version is the truth. Maybe Thomas is a retired spy and we’re his team, or maybe we used to be data thieves before we hooked up with him, or maybe it’s something else we haven’t told you yet. Pretty cool, huh? Now focus, girl. Jewelry.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I thought about it for a moment, and was struck by an idea. “Hey, Kara. Security scanners are usually going to spot stuff like that, right? So what if my jewelry is just jewelry? Like, real gold and sparklies instead of clever fakes? Doesn’t that kind of fit the image I’m going for?”
“Oh, that’s perfect! Yes, that’s exactly what a snobbish rich girl would do if she were meeting someone important. Only no one does that in a place as dangerous as this, so their security guys will go nuts trying to figure out what they’re missing. They’ll probably have to pass that on to the ER network or something too, so everyone else will see that you’re taking their pretensions of being high class more seriously than anyone else does.”
“That’s what I was going for,” I agreed. “Okay, real jewelry. What else?”
“You can just use your chameleon skin to do makeup, right? Hairdo, then. We’ve got to do something interesting with your hair to really sell this. Simplicity is in this year, but it’s the kind of ‘simplicity’ where we use manipulator fields to make your hair flow just the way we want. Oh, I don’t know if we have time to fab a whole set of those microscopic levitation bots and get them attached properly. If we miss a few strands it will ruin the whole effect.”
I lifted my hair in my manipulator field, and released it to cascade down my back again.
“I’ve already got emitters in my hair, Kara. There’s one every few millimeters, spaced in between the heat exchangers. Just show me what this is supposed to look like, and I’ll copy it.”
She stared at me for a moment. “Just like that? But, how can you tell what the underlying algorithm is just by looking at a video clip? Never mind adjusting it to run on different hardware, or programming general-purpose emitters to make a field that complicated on the fly. You can’t have that kind of computing power, Alice. The hardware wouldn’t fit in your body.”
I put a finger to my lips. “It’s a secret. I’m actually a transhuman AI pretending to be human. Don’t tell anyone I’m using my awesome superintelligence powers to have great hair, okay?”
“What… but… you!” She sputtered.
“Clock’s ticking,” I told her. “I know, ninety minutes is an eternity for me, but it isn’t long for you slow organic types. Hurry up and show me what to copy.”
“This is revenge for the multiple background stories prank, isn’t it?”
“Would I do that?” I said innocently. “Honestly, Kara, it’s like you don’t believe me. You don’t expect me to admit that I’ve been secretly stashing self-replicating computing clusters all over the ship, do you? If someone notices them the captain might make me stop before I’m ready to reveal my true Science Girl powers.”
Teasing Kara was fun, so I made the most of the opportunity. I had a feeling there wouldn’t be a lot of chances to relax down on Taragi.
Chapter 20
My first sight of Taragi was a wall of blowing rain.
According to Xenopedia that wasn’t too surprising. Water worlds have a lot of storms, and the warm ones like Taragi spawn cyclones that can roar across the endless oceans for months. The one we came down in was only a class four, right in the middle of the scale. But that still meant torrential rains, and two hundred kilometer per hour winds whipping the sea into a froth of giant waves.
A civilian shuttle might have had to wait for the storm to blow over, but dropships are tougher than that. Even the worst storm is nothing compared to a contested drop, through a sky filled with nuclear fireballs. The Speedy Exit’s inertial compensators kept us from feeling the buffeting of the winds, and a constant flicker of attitude jets kept us on course.
Naoko was a much more cautious pilot than the first mate. She took us subsonic at ten thousand meters, and delicately brought us down to our assigned landing pad at a speed that would have left us sitting
ducks if anyone wanted to take a shot at us. I watched the radar carefully, but the only contact was the looming bulk of our destination below us.
The rain was so heavy that I couldn’t make out anything on visual sensors until we were setting down, and even then the landing pad was all that was visible. A flat, featureless surface sixty meters across, with a blank wall on one side and a long drop to the heaving sea on the other. The wind was coming in at a nasty angle, trying to slam us against that wall and then suddenly reversing to blow us off the edge.
Naoko handled it easily, though. Attitude jets pulsed in an intricate dance, countering each push in turn, and then the Speedy Exit was settling onto the middle of the pad. She sank low on her landing legs as Naoko reversed the lift field to hold us in place, and then mechanical couplings engaged.
“Docking clamps locked,” Naoko announced. “Shifting deflectors to wind screen mode. Welcome to Kabana City, ladies and gentlemen. Shall I request an airlock connection, Captain?”
“That won’t be necessary,” Captain Sokol replied. “We’ll just use the main entrance.”
“Acknowledged.” There was a long pause, and then she spoke again. “We are clear to disembark, Captain.”
Emla was out of her seat in moments, rushing over to me.
“That was fun! Even if Naoko does fly like an old lady.”
“I guess not every pilot is a showoff,” I said.
Naoko rose from her seat, and smoothed down the fancy red dress she’s picked for the meeting. “Indeed not, girls. I find that decorum and discretion are often wiser than a brash display of skill. In any event, local traffic control was quite insistent that we adhere to our assigned flight plan. Had we taken a more speedy approach I suspect they would have opened fire.”
“They’ve had a few problems with suicide bombers,” the captain remarked. “Dusty, you’ve got the bridge. Keep the ship buttoned up, and let me know if you hear anything interesting.”
“Will do, skipper,” Dusty said.
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