Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1)

by E. William Brown

  His eyes went to the long patch of medigel on my arm. “Is that where you got injured?”

  “No,” Naoko interrupted. “I fear that I blundered into a monster in the swamp.”

  I tried not to roll my eyes. “It was just a hexagator, Naoko. They’re not even fast enough to be dangerous, normally. But, um, she stepped on one, sir, so I had to get her away from it quick. We dodged the teeth, sir, but it got a good whack in on me with its tail before I could get us up a tree.”

  “A hexagator,” the captain said slowly. “Computer, display Xenopedia entry for Felicitan hexagators.”

  A new display window popped up above his desk. He studied the image for a moment, and sighed.

  “Naoko, did you leave the port without your armor?”

  “The integral weapons are a violation of local ordinance, Captain,” she said softly.

  “Naoko,” he said again, sounding disappointed this time. “Why didn’t you call for help?”

  “Males are not allowed on Felicity, and the techs would not be safe there,” she pointed out. “Beatrice is the only crew member who could come down, and I can only imagine the fuss she would have made. I didn’t want to be a bother, or cost the ship extra landing fees.”

  “You could have just come back up,” he pointed out.

  “And fail my mission?” Naoko said incredulously. “Never! I’ve caused you far too much trouble as it is, Captain.”

  He gave an aggravated sigh. “Naoko, you aren’t with the Masu-kai anymore. You don’t have to complete every mission on pain of death, and you certainly don’t have to act like everyone’s servant. You’re a member of my crew, and I expect you to ask for help when you need it. Do you have any idea how worried we’ve been? When you canceled your launch window and went off the grid Jim was about ready to drop an extraction team to find you. I only stopped him because I had a hunch you’d make it back on your own.”

  “What? But Captain, we’d be barred from the system if he did that. We’d lose access to the cheapest source of botanicals in the cluster, and the Association would surely levy a fine.”

  “The lives of my crew are more important than profits,” the captain said firmly. “Naoko, please. Stop trying to do everything yourself. We’re a team, here.”

  Naoko hung her head. “I’m sorry, my captain. I promise, I shall endeavor to do better.”

  “Good. Now what’s the story with our guest? Do you have somewhere to go, Alice?”

  “No, sir. I was trying to find a ship willing to hire me, sir, but I don’t have any certifications. Please, sir, will you at least drop me off someplace where a little orphan girl might be able to survive? I don’t eat much, and I promise I won’t cause any trouble on your ship.”

  I gave him my best puppy eyes.

  “Not bad,” he chuckled. “You need to practice, but I’d give it a seven out of ten.”

  I pouted.

  “Oh, don’t look at me like that. I was handling street rats on Old Earth long before you were born. Or was it built?”

  “Born, sir,” I told him. “I had a mother, at least. But I barely remember her. I was a baby when the Federation Navy dropped me off on Felicity. So I really don’t know what I am, sir, or what I’m supposed to be good for. I just know the matrons were sending me to have my enhancements pulled out so they could brainwash me, and if that didn’t work they’d probably kill me. Sir.”

  “Hmm. Well, you’ve already risked your own safety to help one of my crew, so I can hardly send you back now. Naoko is offering to share her cut of the profit on those flowers with you, and if the deal comes off as planned that should be more than enough to cover your passage. But there might be another option for you, if you’re ready to work.”

  My breath caught. “Yes, sir. I can work. Whatever you want me to do, sir.”

  “Good. I normally run a small crew, because things are more profitable that way. But it can be useful to have an extra hand around to handle whatever odd jobs come up, and as you’ve seen Naoko has her limits. We’re supposed to deliver those presence blossoms to a collector on Wirtan Station, but we’ve got several other stops to hit before we get there. Make yourself useful along the way, and I might be willing to hire you on as our new cabin girl.”

  “Thank you, sir! I, yes, please, I promise I’ll do whatever needs doing. Um, what does a cabin girl do, sir?”

  “Whatever needs doing,” he said. “Including a lot of training, so she’ll be qualified to move up to a regular crew position eventually. It’s an old tradition, used for training up new crew members in regions where there aren’t any trustworthy certification authorities.”

  I felt my jaw drop. “That… that’s perfect, sir! Thank you so much for giving me a chance, sir. I won’t let you down.”

  “See that you don’t. Naoko, why don’t you and Alice head down to medical and get yourselves checked out? I assume there are bugs and things in this swamp you two were trudging around in?”

  “Gnats, midges, mosquitoes, leeches,” I confirmed.

  “Leeches!” Naoko squeaked. “Why would anyone purposely put leeches in their biosphere?”

  I shrugged. “Because Old Earth had them?”

  “It still does,” the captain said. “There are plenty of swamps that never got nuked, and the bioweapons mostly target humans. But that’s a topic for another day. Get yourselves checked out, and then Naoko can set you up with a cabin and essentials. After that I suggest you get some rest. We don’t have any passengers at the moment, so Naoko can give you a basic orientation tomorrow.”

  I waited until we were safely down the hall to stop and heave a sigh of relief.

  “He’s kind of scary,” I said. “What’s his name?”

  Naoko gave me an odd look. “Dan Sokol, but you should always call him ‘Captain’ or ‘Captain Sokol’. You aren’t connected to the ER network, are you? Why not?”

  “I don’t even know what that is,” I admitted. “Something else we didn’t have at the orphanage, I guess. Sorry I’m such a noob, Naoko. I’ll try to learn quick.”

  She smiled, and put her arm around my shoulders. “It’s quite alright, Alice. You’re a very clever girl, and I’m sure we’ll have you caught up in no time. I’m glad my captain decided to give you a chance. I was hoping that would happen.”

  “Thank you for helping me, Naoko. Seriously, I probably owe you my life.”

  “You saved me as well, little Alice. At this point there’s nothing for it but to declare eternal friendship, and continue to render mutual assistance as needed.”

  My smile was back. “You’re right, Naoko. We’ll just have to be friends. So, um, I thought it was morning?”

  “At the spaceport, perhaps. By the ship’s clock it is now twenty-one hundred, so we’d best get to medical before the doctor becomes too impatient.”

  She led me down a corridor to another lift, which took us deep into the belly of the ship. There was a big waiting room right off the lift, and a medical bay much bigger than I could imagine a freighter crew needing. There must have been twenty private treatment rooms, and dormant medical robots sat everywhere. Naoko confidently led me down a hall to a larger room full of mysterious equipment, where we found another man waiting for us.

  This one wasn’t quite as tall as Captain Sokol, although at two hundred centimeters he still towered over Naoko and me. He wasn’t as massively built as the captain either, but he was completely bald and his eyes were both cybernetic. It made him look intimidating, and the sterile white bodysuit and lab coat he wore didn’t help.

  “Alice, this is Doctor Misra,” Naoko said. “Doctor, this is Alice Long.”

  I bowed. “Pleased to meet you, Doctor.”

  “Yes, yes, charmed I’m sure. I hear you’re auditioning to join the crew? Well, let’s have a look at you. Sit here, please, on the diagnostic couch. Are you receiving that connection request?”

  I sat gingerly in the odd-looking chair he’d pointed to. It was comfortably padded, and adjusted itself t
o fit my size perfectly. But it was packed full of equipment that I couldn’t identify.

  “Connection request? Oh, I guess I’m getting a lot of those. Let’s see, that all looks like bot chatter, and those are all old. Do you mean the one coming from that box over there, that says ‘Diagnostic Handshake’ in the header?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Your enhancements include radio direction finding, but you don’t even have a basic connection manager program? Interesting. Yes, please accept that connection if you can.”

  There were a lot of sensors looking at me now. Feeling a little nervous, I accepted the connection and immediately found myself bombarded with data. The medical bay wanted to know if I had any of a thousand different software packages running. Did spacers usually have medical programs on their implant computers? I guess that made some kind of sense.

  I didn’t have any of the programs it was looking for, really. But I had one that was eager to pretend it was a copy of Galsoft Medsuit Pro 17.4, so I let that run.

  “Ah, here we go,” the doctor said. “Naoko, why don’t you get out of that armor and onto the other diagnostic couch. I doubt there’s anything wrong with you, but we can let the automatics make sure of that while I look this over.”

  “Of course, Doctor.”

  Naoko’s armor unwrapped itself from around her, hundreds of components unlocking and shifting around in complicated ways until she was standing there in just a thin jumpsuit. The armor continued to move as she stepped away from it, arranging itself for storage. Wow, that must have been an expensive feature.

  “You haven’t been taking proper care of yourself, have you young lady?”

  I turned my attention back to the doctor.

  “You mean the malnutrition warnings?” I asked. “I’ve had a lot of those for as long as I can remember. The orphanage served a vegetarian diet, and then in the jungle I had to make do with whatever I could find. Um, what’s an ‘MGE feedstock’, anyway?”

  “They didn’t teach you much at this orphanage of yours, did they? It stands for Medical Grade Electronics, and it’s a food supplement for morphs and techs that are designed to grow onboard computers. Honestly, girl, you have so many warnings I’m surprised you can function.”

  I shrugged. “I guess mom paid for good engineering. Um, I don’t suppose the ship could maybe spare a little of that stuff?”

  “Good heavens, girl, do you think we’d take you in and then starve you? What kind of monsters do you think we are? No, never mind, you were raised by savages. Of course you don’t know any better.”

  “She came aboard with no possessions at all,” Naoko put in. “Even her clothes came out of the shuttle’s fabber.”

  “Barbarians,” the doctor sniffed. “You’ll find things are different here, Alice. Now, I’m putting you on a special recovery diet until those malnutrition warnings are dealt with. I want you eating three meals a day, and you’ll get a large glass of nutrient shake with every meal. Those will have a blend of supplements in them to match what your systems need, so try to finish them no matter what.”

  “Yes, sir!” I said happily. “Does that mean I get to eat more, too?”

  He smiled, and patted me on the head. “Yes, Alice. Eat as much as you can. According to this you should be getting at least six thousand calories a day, and you’ve been subsisting on a fraction of that. Normally I’d be telling you to ease into such a large dietary change, but your digestive system has some adaptability mods that should make than unnecessary. Just listen to your diagnostics, and eat whenever you’re hungry.”

  Something else in the invisible display caught his attention, and he frowned angrily. “What were those terraformers thinking? I’m seeing traces of no less than six parasitic organisms from that swamp. If you girls didn’t have top of the line medical packages you’d both be seriously ill. Naoko, you’ll need to take a quick dip in a treatment tank to make sure none of that fungus is clinging to your skin. Have your armor go through an internal decontamination as well, before you put it back on.”

  “I will, Doctor. Ugh, that place was so disgusting! What about Alice?”

  Doctor Misra studied his invisible display for a minute.

  “It seems young Alice has military-grade combat nanites backing up her immune system,” he observed. “I’m picking up external contaminants consistent with a long stay in a toxic environment, but internally there’s nothing but stray protein fragments. Remind me never to take a blood sample from you, Alice. Your nanites would probably eat the equipment.”

  Darn right they would, some instinct in the back of my head agreed. No one gets to take me apart to see how I work.

  Huh.

  “Is there a way to get a manual for all my enhancements?” I asked. “It seems like I never know about these things until they come up, and it’s getting kind of old.”

  “I expect that will clear up once your electronics grow in properly. You’re suffering from a severe case of stunted development at the moment, but I’d prefer not to poke at your systems until you’re properly in control of them all. Your parents were apparently either military or survivalists, and either way you’re likely to have active defenses waiting to be triggered. Now, let’s get you both decontaminated.”

  The medical decontamination involved a shower stall, which sprayed me down with weird purple goop that crawled across my skin like it was alive. I had to close my eyes and hold my breath for a minute while microbots scrubbed every trace of dirt and contaminants off my skin. Then the shower switched to a clear solution that felt more like water, and a bunch of robotic arms scrubbed me down to make sure none of the goop stuck. When I was done there was a fresh set of clothes waiting for me, still warm from the fabber.

  Naoko took a few minutes longer than I did, probably because she had to take care of her armor. While we waited the doctor walked me through how to connect properly to the ship’s network, which was kind of cool. There was a com system, of course, but also a whole bunch of data feeds for things like news, announcements and the ship’s calendar. The ER system Naoko had mentioned was some kind of data mining tool, that constantly dug through everything looking for tidbits I might be interested in. Of course, the way it wanted to show me that information was crazy.

  “Interesting,” the doctor said when I asked about it. “A baseline human would perceive enhanced reality tags as a set of glowing labels floating in the air.”

  “I can’t imagine letting some outside software overwrite what I see like that,” I complained.

  “Yes, that’s the traditional objection of the survivalists. Most people find the system too useful to simply ignore, however.”

  “Oh, I’m not ignoring it,” I told him. “I’m reading the messages it sends me now, I’m just not letting it mess with my senses.”

  “I see. It sounds as if you have some multiplexing in your sensory processing.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you can watch more than one data stream at the same time. Sensory multiplexing is normally used for controlling drone swarms or supervising bots, but it’s considered a radical enhancement. No one on this ship would think anything of it, but there are colonies where you wouldn’t be considered human. You should be careful who you mention that to, little Alice.”

  “I always am, Doctor,” I assured him.

  Naoko reappeared then, wearing a thin jumpsuit and slippers instead of her armor.

  “Am I safe now, Doctor? No more creepy crawlies?”

  He gave her a thin smile. “You have a clean bill of health, Naoko.”

  “Wonderful! Oh, but what about Alice’s poor arm?”

  “It’s just a scrape, Naoko. It’s not a big deal.”

  “I’m afraid it would be hazardous to attempt a skin reconstruction when her nanotech may not recognize my equipment as friendly,” Doctor Misra said. “But in this case it hardly matters. Eat something before you go to bed, Alice, and I expect it will be fully regenerated by morning.”

  “
Yeah, that sounds about right. Don’t fuss, Naoko, I’m fine.”

  “If you say so, Alice. Well then, let me find you a room. You must be exhausted after staying up all night. I know I am.”

  I was, actually. Maybe the stress of my long flight across Felicity’s jungles was catching up to me, but I felt like I could sleep for a week.

  Naoko led me on another trek across the ship, back up the lift and down a hall to an area that was marked ‘Passenger Quarters’ in the maps that I now had access to.

  “This is just for tonight,” she explained as she led me through a roomy passenger lounge. “I’ll get you set up with a cabin of your own tomorrow. I’m afraid we don’t have companions assigned to the rooms, but feel free to call me if you need anything. You can order room service if you get hungry, and there’s a clothing fabber in your bathroom.”

  She opened a door marked ‘Passenger Stateroom 6’, and I stopped to stare. It was huge! There was a living room that must have been thirty square meters, and that was just the entrance area. Beyond that the map showed a kitchen, study, bedroom, two storage rooms and a huge bathing area.

  “Your passengers must be rich,” I said.

  “Not usually. It’s a big ship, and there aren’t many of us on board, so space is rarely a problem. Also, I don’t mean to embarrass you, but I’m afraid you’re going to find that Felicity is very poor. Even the little Dark Space colonies we trade with are generally quite rich compared to what you’re used to.”

  “Really? Well, I guess that just means I’ll be rich too someday.”

  Naoko smiled, and hugged me. “That’s the spirit. Get some rest now, Alice. Breakfast is at 0800. Can you find your way to the mess hall?”

  “The one in the crew space up on deck 12? Yes, I see it on the map.”

  “Good. I have breakfast with my captain, but I’ll meet you there afterwards.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Then I was alone.

  I raided the suite’s pantry for a snack, and considered what to do next. I’d never had my own fabber before, and I was tempted to play around with it. But the bed was calling me.