Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1)

by E. William Brown

  “A big hug, and a chance to say ‘I told you so’,” I suggested.

  “Deal. Good luck, nut.”

  “Good luck to you too, Dika. May the most awesome girl win.”

  It wasn’t long before the proctor arrived to collect Dika for her day in the Hole. I was a little worried about her, but she’d come through punishments before. She’d survive, and without me there to draw attention to her she’d have everyone convinced she was completely reformed in a week.

  A few minutes after that the bot stirred, and silently glided out of the room. I grinned triumphantly. I’d been counting on that. The bots had a lot of routine duties to see to, patrolling the building and grounds to make sure everything was safe. The surrounding forest was full of wild animals, and some of them would happily make a snack of a little orphan girl if they got the chance. Since the security computer thought I was safely restrained, keeping an eye on me would be a lower priority for it than watching out for the whole community.

  Getting out of the capture web should have been impossible. It was much too strong for me to just tear free, even if I ramped my strength up to max and burned off my whole energy reserve struggling. My teeth would probably cut it if I could bring them to bear, but the way I was trussed up made that pretty much impossible. Fortunately I had other, less predictable options.

  I closed my eyes, and focused on my chemosynthesis system. I’d learned a couple of years ago that I could use it to change my scent, so the mosquitoes that swarmed in the damper parts of the forest wouldn’t think I was food. I could secrete other chemicals, too. The network of microscopic nanofabs in my skin could make any molecule I had data on, and the database I’d been born with had a few dozen useful entries in it. Signaling pheromones. Body odor, and agents to neutralize it. A cleaning solution that could have saved me a lot of trouble this morning, if I’d thought to use it on my face.

  Capture web solvent.

  The transparent goop seeped out of my skin, and started to eat away at the webbing. Unfortunately the disposable shifts they issued residents at the orphanage must have been manufactured from the same base, because my clothes dissolved too. Wonderful. Well, that was just extra motivation to make sure no one saw me leave.

  What did it say about my family, that mom had made sure her baby girl had a handy way to escape from standard police restraints?

  Hopefully I’d get the chance to find out someday. But there was a lot of capture web, and my feedstock reserves were tiny. I got my arms free, and wiggled off the bench. But my ankles were still stuck together when I ran dry. I could cannibalize my own flesh to make more feedstock, but I didn’t exactly have a lot of spare weight to lose. Besides, that would take ten or fifteen minutes. What if Matron Gisel came back before then?

  Instead I managed to wiggle around enough to get my ankles up near my face, where I could gnaw away the remaining strands. They were a lot tougher than the zango’s bones, but they weren’t as hard as my teeth. A few moments of frantic work left my jaw aching, but they parted one by one.

  The moment I had the last one free I was on my feet, and rushing towards the window. It didn’t have a lock, and it took only a moment to work the latch and swing it open. Then I was outside, with the sun on my face and leaves all around me.

  I wasn’t sure how my tree climbing actually worked. My database said it had to do with ‘van der Waals attraction’, but we’d never covered that in science class. All I knew was that my skin will stick to anything if I want it to, and it only takes a thought to turn the stickiness on and off.

  I slithered silently up the side of the tree, leaving no marks on the rough bark behind me. There was a long branch I could use to cross a narrow spot in the yard surrounding the orphanage, and reach a greatoak in the surrounding forest. But those security bots were roaming around somewhere out here, and I had no idea if I could actually fight one. Better to do everything I could to avoid them.

  Well, at least I was already naked. Reluctantly, I activated my stealth suite.

  My skin changed color, blending in with the bark I clung to. I stopped breathing, switching to my little internal oxygen store. Active sound suppression would quiet my heartbeat and any other small sounds I might make, and there were other measures I didn’t really understand. Things to hide me from motion sensors, bottle up my body heat, and counter a long list of other senses.

  None of it was perfect. If I was careless enough to get too close to a bot it would still see me, and probably tag me as a threat instead of a harmless little girl. I couldn’t keep it up for long, either. The system sucked down buckets of power, burning energy faster than a hard workout. But I only needed it for a few minutes.

  Like a ghost, I vanished into the vast expanse of trackless forest that surrounded the orphanage. Let them try to pick me out among the monkeys and dire badgers, if they didn’t just give up and assume I’d been eaten. How much effort would they go to, for the sake of one troublesome orphan?

  Chapter 2

  Three weeks later, another dawn found me carefully peering through the upper branches of a goldenbough tree at the perimeter fence surrounding the Faith’s Door Spaceport.

  I’d lost two kilos on the trip, and I was getting really sick of the taste of raw meat. But I’d crossed two thousand kilometers of jungle, swamp and hill country to reach my destination, at a pace I knew no one else at the orphanage could have matched. No one would be expecting that. Even if the matrons hadn’t given me up for dead, they wouldn’t be looking for me here.

  Now all I had to do was somehow sneak past spaceport security, and talk a space captain into hiring me. Or maybe stow away on a ship, if I had to.

  Easy, right?

  I studied the fence again. At first glance it looked like a series of tall brown poles with sheets of dark green fabric hung between them. But my spectrometer said the ‘fabric’ was some kind of woven carbon fiber, and I was picking up a lot of electrical activity. Sensors, probably, so if I tried to climb over it I’d be spotted for sure. The fence was a little overgrown in places, but the other side was just a cleared area twenty meters wide with another fence beyond it. Getting past that without being seen would be tough.

  This was probably the wrong place to try it, anyway. Looking over the fence from my treetop perch, I could see a wide black expanse of landing field with bright orange markings here and there. It was way too open for sneaking unless I used my stealth suite, and I couldn’t afford to burn off that kind of energy right now.

  Here and there I could see spaceships. Or maybe just shuttles. Most of the gleaming machines on the field seemed too small to be real spaceships, and one of them even had wings. But there were a couple of blocky shapes that had to be a hundred meters long. Each of those was surrounded by swarms of bots, busily unloading cargo containers.

  There were buildings in the distance, on the other side of the landing field. Maybe there would be less security there?

  I shimmied down the tree, and started working my way around the spaceport. There was a swamp bordering the fence to the south, so I circled around to the north instead. The ground was firmer there, and I made good time jogging through the trees. There didn’t seem to be any security bots, so at least that was one less thing to worry about.

  It was kind of weird, seeing artificial buildings for the first time. I was used to the great housetrees that made up the orphanage, and the handful of places the matrons had taken us to on field trips over the years. Housetrees can grow to full size in just three or four years, and you can buy custom versions designed to grow into any shape you might want. They provide light and clean water for their inhabitants, and even a little bit of power for a local network. Why would anyone go to all the trouble of building something artificial, when you could just plant a seed and wait?

  Apparently offworlders didn’t think that way, because I found a whole clump of odd-looking buildings on the other side of the spaceport. They came in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes, from rows of giant bo
xes to little round huts. A tall tower sculpted into the shape of a double helix rose from an area filled with flashing lights and radio noise, which seemed to be the heart of the… town?

  My database supplied the unfamiliar word. I looked over the messy spread of buildings again, and nodded. Yeah, a town.

  Getting in proved easier than I expected. There was only a single line of fence around the town, probably to keep animals from wandering in out of the jungle. A lot of the perimeter was just buildings with bits of fence blocking the spaces between them, and there were places where the jungle grew right up to them. Most of the buildings didn’t seem to have security, either. All I had to do to get in was climb a tree, and crawl out to where I could drop onto a convenient roof.

  Sweet. I couldn’t keep the grin off my face as I crawled to the edge of the roof, and peered carefully down at the street below.

  People. So many people, and all of them looked so interesting. I’d learned in class that Felicity has a population of over thirty million, but settlements of more than a hundred people were rare. The dryads like their nature, and staying spread out was supposed to minimize their ecological impact.

  Clearly, no one here cared about that. There must have been thousands of people in the town, and hardly any of them were dryads. I saw lots of big, rough-looking women wearing everything from armored jumpsuits to leather miniskirts. A good number of dog and cat morphs were sprinkled through the crowd, along with more bots and androids than I’d ever seen before.

  “This looks like my kind of place,” I said to myself. “Now, how do I get some clothes?”

  There was an amazing amount of radio noise in the air, and something in the back of my head recognized parts of it. Com signals, radar implants, private datalinks… aha! There was a public datanet.

  I fumbled my way through the login handshake, and created an account. It wanted an ID code? Well, I wasn’t about to use my real one, but… oh, good. There was a program in my head for generating fake codes. I threw together a forged identity packet, and used it to log in to the network.

  Thanks, Mom. But why did you think your little girl would need to be able to forge identity codes? For that matter, how did you do it? Stealing an identity provider’s private key can’t have been easy.

  I’d barely finished the login when a few hundred data packets hit me all at once. Messages from shops wanting to sell me things, a whole bunch of ‘surveys’ asking personal questions I wasn’t going to answer, and… oh, goddess.

  I blushed furiously. Why was Tatiana’s Massage Parlor sending me naughty pictures of their masseuses? Didn’t their computer see the age header on my identity packet?

  Was this advertising? No wonder it was so restricted on Felicity.

  I told myself to ignore any more messages like those, and went looking for public services. That’s what networks like this were supposed to be for, right? Aha, there was the information site. Maps of the town, port rules, locations of public facilities. That was the stuff I needed.

  It took the better part of an hour to work my way carefully across the town to a public restroom that didn’t seem to be very busy. I watched it for long enough to be pretty sure it was empty, and then cloaked myself just long enough to drop off the roof and dart inside.

  Being surrounded by walls of some synthetic material instead of wood was kind of weird, but aside from that the layout was about what I expected. Sinks and mirrors in the front, and then a hallway lined with doors. I hurried nervously down the hall to the full-service cubicles at the end, and claimed the first one I came to.

  It had all the essentials, just like I’d hoped. A toilet, in its own little room. A sink and mirror, with some kind of cosmetics station. A shower, and oh goddess was I looking forward to getting clean again. Then the service closet, with a laundry machine and clothes fabber right next to the first aid station. Perfect.

  After drowning myself in hot water and body wash for half an hour I felt a lot more human. I picked out a simple red dress from the fabber’s menu, with underwear and matching shoes. Maybe a ribbon for my hair? No, that made me look three years younger. No one was going to hire a girl they thought was ten.

  Would they hire a girl who looked thirteen? I had basically no skills a spaceship crew would be interested in. Most captains would just laugh in my face, wouldn’t they?

  “Then I’ll keep trying until I find someone who doesn’t,” I told my reflection. “I can live here for a long time if I have to. I can sneak out to catch meals, or go into conservation mode and just not eat for a couple of weeks. A lot of ships must come through here, so it’s only a matter of time until I find someone who’ll give me a chance.”

  My reflection looked skeptical. But I didn’t have another option, so instead of dwelling on things I pulled up the list of ships in port and started planning my approach.

  The directory said there were forty-eight shuttles on the landing field, but six of them were from big cargo ships that didn’t even send humans down with them. Five more were owned by Felicity natives, who I didn’t dare approach, and three were from military ships. That left thirty-four possibilities, including everything from tramp freighters to private yachts. One of them was bound to give me a chance, right?

  “Yolanda Corporation does not hire anonymous ragamuffins with no record of training or prior service.”

  “Run on back to mommy, little girl. Space is no place for kids.”

  “Can you run a fusion plant, or rebuild these damned multifuel thruster feeds when they get fouled up? No? Then get lost.”

  “We’ve got an opening in passenger service, but you’re not old enough for that job.”

  It was enough to make a girl feel unwanted.

  “Why are you so desperate to get into space?” A tired-looking faerie morph asked me at one point.

  “Do you have any idea how crazy this planet is?” I replied. “I can’t live here for long.”

  She sighed. “Teenagers. Always so dramatic. Look, kid, you’re doing this the wrong way. You need to go back to school and get your spacer certs, and then get a job with a reputable company that has offices on Felicity. If you keep wandering around a port town asking strangers to let you on their ship someone is going to end up kidnapping you, and once they’re out of the system no one will bother tracking you down. Unless your parents are rich?”

  “I’m an orphan,” I admitted.

  “There, you see? Now go home, before you get in over your head.”

  “Ma’am, you don’t know how things work here on Felicity. I’m not just being dramatic. If I stay here they’re either going to rip out my enhancements and brainwash me, or break something they don’t understand and kill me. Please, ma’am, I’m desperate. I can follow orders, and I’ll do whatever work you want. I don’t need to be paid, or anything like that. I just need a way off this rock.”

  For a second I thought I’d gotten through to her. But then she shrugged, and turned back to the cargo bots she was supervising. “Sorry, kid. Captain isn’t hiring right now, and he doesn’t let crewmembers bring dependents on board.”

  By nightfall I’d tried every ship in the port, and been turned away by all of them. Well, there were two ships that had been locked up, with no sign of any crew around. But I couldn’t plead my case to a closed door, so that was no help.

  I trudged wearily through the streets of the port, trying to think of something else I could try. There had to be hundreds of spacers gathered in the bars and restaurants along the port’s main road. If I were a social infiltration type like Kovy it wouldn’t take an hour to find some lonely traveler and have her wrapped around my finger. But I had no idea how to do something like that.

  A sudden burst of static from an alley caught my attention. It was so loud it completely drowned out the port datanet. Was that a jammer? Why would anyone be running a com jammer in the middle of a spaceport?

  I ducked into the alley, curious to see what was going on. From there the sound of an argument led me arou
nd a corner, to where three rough-looking dog morphs were confronting an elegant lady in the fanciest dress I’d ever seen. The language they spoke was one I’d never heard before.

  But it was in my database. Japanese. One of the frontier dialects, but it wasn’t that different from the traditional version that I knew. I could understand them just fine.

  “As I said before, I am no longer Mr. Ishida’s property,” the fancy lady was saying. “Captain Sokol commands my loyalty now, and while I have no intention of violating past confidences I also will not allow myself to be stolen. I suggest you withdraw and request new instructions, before things become unpleasant.”

  “Like we’re going to be intimidated by some jumped-up geisha?” One of the dog morphs sneered. “The rose bends to the storm, Naoko. Stand down, and do as you’re told.”

  The lady flinched back a step. “What? No, you can’t… who told you that phrase?”

  That was when one of the dog girls spotted me, and made a grab for my arm. “Jin! We’ve got a witness here.”

  She was fast. A lot faster than any of the girls at the orphanage. But she was twice my weight, and that made her just a little too slow to catch me. I ducked under her hand, swatting her arm away as I spun behind her, and the world slowed down.

  Three against one was bad odds. Maybe Naoko would fight, but it sounded like they might have used a control code on her. Did that mean she was an android? She looked organic to me, except that there was a computer inside her head instead of a brain. That’s right, I’d seen that on a vidshow once. Sometimes rich people put their androids in organic bodies instead of synthetic ones, because it’s supposed to be more ‘authentic’ or something.

  Later. I couldn’t afford to get into a big fight here, especially since I had no idea if I could win. What was the fastest way to make them go away?