"Don't worry about it," I lied. "It's licensed. And I'm not trying to bugger you for the fare." I held the gun in one hand while I pulled my transfer card with the other and slid it in the slot. "There, see?" I said.
"Yes, mis'," it said, like a good little machine. I took my card back and then took a deep breath and held it as the cab set down sweetly on East Deng and slid the door back.
The instant the door opened I spotted the eye, pointed the gun, and squeezed the trigger.
I felt a jerk as the Sony-Remington targeted the eye; then it went whump, a deep sort of sound that I felt in my hands and the base of my skull, as well as my ears. A fine spray of gunk hissed around me from the recoil damping, and I was thrown back onto the seat by the recoil anyway-the HG-2's just a handgun, after all; it hasn't got room to be truly recoilless with a heavy-gravity charge. My right arm felt like I'd rammed it against a wall, felt like the shock bruised all the muscles right up to my shoulder. By the time I hit the upholstery I heard the bang as the spy-eye was blown to splinters- a good loud bang, like a two-meter balloon popping. Fragments whickered and whistled away in every direction, and I heard them rattle across pavement and on the cab's outer shell.
I felt the seat I'd landed on ripple desperately under me as it tried to accommodate my sudden arrival.
I'd blinked when the gun went off-I always do-so I'd missed most of the flash. By the time my eyes were open and focused again the spy-eye was just powder and scrap, scattered across the surrounding landscape. Some of the pieces were glowing red-hot, and a few of the more aerodynamically-inclined fragments were still drifting down; none of them were bigger than my thumbnail.
I love the Sony-Remington HG-2. It's a hell of a weapon. I'm told that, on the heavy-gravity planets it was meant for, it doesn't do much more damage than a regular gun does on Epimetheus, but there in Nightside City, in just nine-tenths of a gee, I could count on it to do a pretty good job on just about anything. If I have to shoot, I don't want what I'm shooting at to have a chance to shoot back; with the HG-2, nothing ever did.
"Sorry about the mess," I told the cab as I looked at the spots the damping spray had left. It was supposed to be clean, odorless, and volatile enough to evaporate in ninety seconds, but it never really was; I don't know if it was because I didn't clean the gun often enough, or I didn't do it right, or there was too much crud in the city air, but it always left a ring of little gray spots. This time about half of them had landed on the cab's interior. The rest were mostly on me. A few fragments of the spy-eye had wound up in the cab, too, and a couple might have hit the shell hard enough to scuff the finish. "Put the cleaning charge on my bill," I said, using my free hand to stick my card back in the slot. "If there's enough to cover it. And if there's anything left, take a little for your trouble." I figured even a cab would recognize that as a bribe not to call the cops.
I guess that cab did, anyway, because I never heard from any cops about shooting the eye.
"Yes, mis'," it said. "Will that be all?"
"No." I settled back onto the seat more comfortably and turned off the gun. "Close the door and take me to 334 Sekizawa," I said. That was about two blocks from Nakada's; I'd figured I could walk the rest of the way from there.
To keep my muscles from stiffening up, I flexed the arm the recoil had banged around. My symbiote had already suppressed the soreness.
I felt a little sorry about blanking the eye like that, but what the hell, it was just a dumb machine. It hadn't had any sense of self-preservation, and might not have really been sentient at all.
I wondered what Mishima would do about losing his gadget. It was a safe bet he wasn't going to be happy with me.
I also wondered if Mishima's reaction would really matter to me after my visit to Nakada.
The cab dropped me on Sekizawa, and I took back my card and climbed out and stood there while it took off. I waited until it was out of sight before I began walking.
The Nakada place was easy enough to find, certainly; counting the grounds it covered an entire block. It was big and elegant, and the exterior was done all in white and silver, but it looked dull red in the light of Eta Cass B. The red was spangled with polychrome highlights where it caught glimmers from the Trap, but it was still dim and shadowed. The dawn drew a bright haze of pink across the sky above that made the house look dead and dark by comparison, and pretty ominous. If there were any windows they didn't show, but of course they could have been inbound-transmissive only. No lights showed at all, anywhere.
I didn't see anything I could identify positively as a gate or door; I knew an entrance had to be there somewhere, but it was blended into the wall. I'd expected that. It was the fashion among those who could afford it, and Sayuri Nakada could sure as hell afford it. If I'd had legitimate business there, the theory went, someone would have told me where the door was. And there would have been lights on to welcome me, too.
I wasn't welcome, but I had business there, all right. The lack of lights might have meant that Nakada wasn't home, but I wasn't going to let a detail like that stop me. Somebody would be in there, even if it was just some basic software.
As I stood there on the front terrace I realized that I'd never put the HG-2 away after shooting the spy-eye, that the gun was still in my hand; I'd turned it off but never reholstered it. Even though I knew that my absentmindedness was a sign that I wasn't really at my best, I decided that my hand was the right place for it. I didn't have the time or the patience to be subtle anymore. I didn't know for sure that the cab hadn't called the cops. I didn't know whether Mishima might be coming after me already. I couldn't afford to waste time figuring out a better approach.
I pointed the HG-2 at a random spot in the middle of the facade, turned it back on, and said, loudly but not shouting, "This thing's loaded with armor-piercing explosive shells, and they can do one hell of a lot of damage. I need to talk to Sayuri Nakada. You get her out here, or let me in, and I'll put down the gun; you give me an argument and I start blowing expensive holes in the wall. If she's not home, you let me in and I'll wait. What'll it be?"
I half expected some security gadget I had never heard of to turn me into bubbling protoplasm, but instead a voice announced, "Mis' Nakada is being consulted. Please stand by."
I stood by, feeling the gun quiver as it searched for a target and didn't find any.
After thirty seconds that seemed like a year or so, another voice spoke, one too nasal for a machine.
"I'm Sayuri Nakada," it said. "Who the hell are you and what do you want here?"
I let the gun sag a little. "Mis' Nakada," I said. "If that's really you, what I want is to talk to you quietly somewhere, in private, about your plans for buying up city real estate cheap and then stopping the sunrise so that it's actually worth something. I'm going to either talk it over with you, or I'm going to put everything I know on the public nets-I've got it all on my com programmed to go out if I don't override by a particular time." I wished I had thought of that back home and actually done it, instead of using it as a last-minute bluff like this. All the incoming data I'd used were in the ITEOD files, of course, but the guesses I'd made weren't anywhere but inside my head-and I had never been able to afford to have backup memory implanted, so if I died those guesses died with me.
Of course, Nakada had no way of knowing I was bluffing. And if I lived long enough to get back to my office, I promised myself, the next time out I wouldn't be.