Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1)

by E. William Brown

  “Should I be picking out weapons?” I asked.

  “I believe we shall recruit the security chief’s assistance on that point.”

  The ship’s database said Security Chief Jim West was an infomorph. I’d never met anyone who’d uploaded their mind to the net before, since that was obviously illegal on Felicity. So I was looking forward to meeting him.

  I wasn’t disappointed. We found Chief West in a garage area near the armory, where he had a team of bots stripping down a spider tank. The body he was wearing was some kind of humanoid warbot, and it was positively covered in drool-worthy hardware. There were mass drivers in the arms, and two shoulder-mounted point defense lasers, and deflector shield emitters everywhere. If it wasn’t for the ER tags I would have mistaken him for a security bot.

  “Hello, Chief West,” Naoko said. “Can you spare us a moment? I need your opinion on self-defense options for Alice here.”

  “The new trainee? There aren’t any ratings in her file,” he said distractedly. “What have you practiced with, Alice?”

  “Nothing, sir,” I admitted. “The matrons didn’t approve of violence.”

  “Fucking pacifists,” he muttered, sounding disgusted. “Are you a pacifist, girl?”

  “No, sir! I just don’t have any training, sir.”

  “That’s ‘chief’, not ‘sir’. I work for a living, and I don’t have time to train a newbie up from scratch right now. Maybe once we leave the cluster, but you’ll have to get by on something else until then. It says here you’ve got boosted reflexes?”

  “Yes, Chief.”

  “Think you can keep your head in a fight?”

  “Yes, Chief.”

  “She’s already proven that,” Naoko put in. “Once when the inugami tried to kidnap me, and again when we were attacked by a dangerous predator in the swamps. Not a moment of panic or hesitation, either time.”

  “Firefights are different,” he pointed out. “But we all have to start somewhere. Come with me.”

  He led us across the room, through an armored hatch and down a narrow hallway lined with armored storage compartments. A hatch opened at his touch, and he stepped inside.

  “I’m assigning you a personal protection swarm,” he said over his shoulder. “This model looks like a couple of those mini-dragon pets the kids are fawning over these days, so you can take them most places without being conspicuous. If you manage to get yourself into a fight they’ll deploy attack microbots to protect you, and lay down smoke to cover your retreat.”

  He pulled a large box out of the storeroom, and handed it to me. Then he paused for a moment, watching me.

  “Strength boost, too?”

  Oh, yeah, I guess the box would have been too heavy for a normal girl my size. It was twenty kilos, easily.

  “Yes, Chief. Um, I can see x-rays, too. I’m not sure what that’s good for, but Naoko thought you might know.”

  He waved off the distraction. “Espionage crap, obviously. You’re too damned small to be designed for a nuclear battlefield. Now remember, Alice, these bots are not toys. They’re lethal weapons, and anyone who sees them in action is going to treat them as such. So I expect you to leave them in covert mode unless you find yourself in a situation where you’re in fear for your life. You do not use them to win a bar fight. You do not use them to beat up obnoxious dirtsiders. You do not use them at all if you can possibly avoid it. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, Chief. I won’t use them at all unless it’s a life or death situation.”

  “Good girl. Be sure to read the instructions carefully. You can use one of the training rooms to practice with them if you get the urge. Their base station will fab consumables for them as needed, and the bots are rated for a fifty year service life. Use them responsibly, and I’ll see about setting you up with some self-defense training the next time we have a long haul in hyperspace.”

  “Thank you, Chief. I’ve managed alright so far, but I really want to learn how to fight before I end up getting in over my head.”

  “I hear you, kid. For now just stick close to the crew when you’re portside, and we’ll take care of you. Oh, and Naoko?”

  “Yes, Chief West?” Naoko said cautiously.

  “Next time you need help, call me. We’ve got the resources, we just have to know that you need them. Don’t be the girl who vanished without a trace because she was too proud to ask for help.”

  Naoko suddenly seemed to find the floor very interesting. “I apologize for my excessive stubbornness, Chief West. I shall endeavor to do better in the future.”

  “Good. I assume the captain has plans for getting those submission codes out of your head?”

  “I assume so, but we have not discussed the issue. I suspect he intends to keep me in the dark, in case I have some contingency that would force me to resist such measures.”

  “Being hacked sucks,” he said sympathetically. “Especially if it’s in your hardware, which it probably is in your case. Try not to let it get you down, though. The captain must have some idea how to fix things, or he wouldn’t have kept you on the ship for so long.”

  “I hope you are correct, Chief West.”

  He nodded. “That’ll do for now, girls. Now scram. I’ve got a lot of work to do before we make Takeo Station.”

  I stayed quiet until we had a couple of closed hatches between us and the chief, since he was bound to have enhanced hearing. Then I relaxed with a giggle.

  “Whew. He’s kind of intense, isn’t he?”

  Naoko patted my shoulder. “That’s his job, Alice. But he’s very protective of the crew, so there’s no need to be afraid of him.”

  “Afraid? Why would I be afraid? I think I like him, actually. He makes me feel safe.”

  “Oh? So you like military men, then?” She said teasingly.

  I blushed. “I didn’t mean it like that! Besides, he’s like, forty. I’m just a little kid to him.”

  “Calendar ages don’t mean much to spacers, Alice. I suppose you have some growing up to do still, but technically you’re older than I am. I was only fabbed two years ago.”

  “That still sounds weird to me. I guess the fox girls were all fabbed as adults, too?”

  “Most androids are,” Naoko agreed.

  “Huh. Well, I wasn’t, and I don’t think I’m quite ready for stuff like that yet. I only started getting those kinds of feelings a few weeks ago.”

  “Ah. Then I shall be gentle of your feelings, my friend, and try not to tease you overmuch.”

  “Thank you, Naoko.”

  We walked in silence for a moment.

  “All those guns and armor are kind of hot,” I admitted.

  “Mmm, aren’t they? If I hadn’t imprinted on the captain, I might well have made a play for him myself. Although luring him back into an organic body might be difficult, and his religion would be a complication.”

  “Oh?”

  “Oh, yes. He’s a Mormon, Third Reformation branch. They think it’s immoral to have less than three wives, and then there’s that whole ‘be fruitful and multiply’ thing…”

  “Naoko! You’re terrible.”

  She grinned at me. “You’re cute when you blush like that. Now, here we are at your cabin. Take a look, and tell me what you think.”

  Had she just been trying to distract me? The hatch we’d come to had my name on it, but the space that my map showed on the other side was way too big to be a cabin. Ten meters wide by twenty deep, with an eight meter ceiling? That had to be wrong.

  I put my hand on the sensor next to the hatch, letting it read my biometrics while I exchanged encryption keys with the lock. It set itself to my code, and gave a happy little chime. Then the hatch slid open, and I gasped.

  Sunlight!

  No, not real sunlight, but the spectrum was a perfect match for Felicity’s star. The bright, airy space had a display ceiling programmed to look like sky, and mirrored walls that turned the greenery along the edges of the room into an illusionary jungle. Th
e floor was soft grass, and a little brook cascaded down a jumble of stones in the back to fill a pond in one corner.

  It took me a second look to realize that there was furniture in the room. A couch and a couple of comfy-looking recliners that all looked like some kind of living plant furniture, clustered around a big display projector. An opening in the back led into a little hallway through which I could see a kitchen, a washroom door, and… stairs? Wait, there was a balcony along the back of the room.

  I ran up the stairs, and found a study overlooking the living room. Beyond that was a huge bedroom with walls of living wood that reminded me of my dorm room at the orphanage. But here there was an opening like a cave mouth on the far side, with a few steps leading down into a bathing area like an underground grotto. There was a tub big enough to swim in, and the fanciest shower I’d ever seen.

  “Do you like it?” Naoko said from behind me.

  “This is all for me?” I said. I could hardly believe it. “I get to live here?”

  “Yes, Alice. This is all for you.”

  The next thing I knew I was hugging her.

  “Thank you, Naoko. I love it! I can’t believe you had something like this in a catalog.”

  “I may have made a few adjustments,” she admitted. “Changing cabin layouts is part of my job as stewardess, so I’ve developed some skill with the system.”

  “You’re amazing! This is perfect, Naoko. It’s like my own little lair in the forest, only not so little. I can’t wait to try that bath. Only, what happened to the Square Deal being a bare-bones freighter with tiny little crew cabins?”

  “I also said that Felicity is quite poor, did I not? Most people would consider this rather cramped, Alice. The ceiling is too low for proper trees, there are no servant quarters or athletic facilities, and the public spaces have barely any separation at all from your private study and bedroom.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t believe how rich you spacers are. I wouldn’t know what to do with that kind of room anyway. Um, can I put fish in the pond?”

  “Certainly. Permanent crew are allowed to keep pets, so long as they can’t escape your cabin. Do a good job, and we can buy you some to celebrate once you’ve signed a contract.”

  “I will, Naoko. You’ll see. I’m going to be a super amazing cabin girl, and the captain is going to wonder how you ever got along without me, and he’ll hire me for real and then I’ll stay here forever.”

  She smiled. “Forever is a long time, Alice. But I shall be glad of your company, for as long as we both remain here.”

  Chapter 6

  I was puzzling my way through a primer on starship electrical systems when the sudden jolt of a hyperspace transition pulled me away from my studies.

  It turned out that the courses Naoko had pointed me to were only six hours long, and the VR instruction could be run at triple speed. So I’d easily blown through all three of them once she left me to study, and moved on to other topics. I’ve always wanted to know more about how things work, an interest that wasn’t considered respectable back on Felicity. So I’d spent most of the night poking through the engineering classes in the ship’s library, reading anything that looked interesting while I ordered one snack after another from the ship’s autochef.

  Well, that and unpacking my new toys. The robots Chief West had assigned me really did look like miniature dragons. They were about the size of a housecat, with eyes like jewels and a beautiful red and black color scheme. They were so realistic I had to look close to see that they were bots, and they acted like little predators. I’d named them Smoke and Ash, and I already loved them.

  Too bad their design wasn’t open source. I’d looked them up in the ship’s database, and apparently they’d cost almost a hundred credits. Ouch.

  I paused the education program, and checked the ship’s status. We were in the Gamma Layer now, and making our approach to Takeo Station? I must have been so caught up in my class that I missed the jump warning.

  The approach might be interesting to watch, and if not I could always go back to studying. So I paused the program, wiggled out of the little VR pod that Naoko had installed behind a hidden panel in my study, and headed for the bathroom. A quick shower, a fresh dress, and I could be down in the crew lounge in plenty of time.

  On second thought, why not wear my spacesuit? Maybe it would help make the rest of the crew take me seriously. I had better odds with that than another dress, even if the ship’s library did have a lot of cute designs.

  I found half a dozen people in the lounge, most of them clustered around a big holographic display that showed the ship’s surroundings. There was a pretty big station a few million kloms out, and all kinds of smaller clutter around us.

  “Alice!” Mina waved me over with a smile. “Come to check out the view?” She gestured at the display with her cup, almost spilling it in the process.

  “That’s right. I’ve never seen another system before. What am I looking at here?”

  “You mean the stations? Pretty typical system defenses. The big station mounts heavy graser cannons, with enough range to pick off anyone trying to get in or out of the system. That globe of sensor platforms a light-minute out is to make sure no one can sneak in close without being spotted.”

  I studied the display for a moment. “I think I get it. The Gamma Layer has better visibility than the Delta Layer, right?”

  In school they’d taught us that there are four hyperspace universes, the Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta layers. Each layer is smaller than the previous one by a factor of pi cubed, so shifting to a higher layer lets you get places a lot faster than you could in normal space. But each layer is a whole universe, and while quantum physics is the same everywhere cosmology isn’t. So each layer had its own unique problems for travelers to overcome.

  “Exactly,” Mina confirmed. “The Delta Layer has this weird repulsive gravity force that keeps stars from forming, and the part corresponding to Known Space is just a huge cloud of diffuse plasma. It interferes quite a bit with long-range sensors, and the big slow-haul cargo ships can’t get up there anyway because the Delta transition requires such a steep power curve. So everyone puts their border security here in the Gamma Layer, where you can see clear to the edge of the universe with a good telescope.”

  I could picture the geometry, now that I thought about it. Hyperspace transitions are pretty obvious, so any ship trying to sneak into the system undetected would have to pass through the Gamma Layer a long way out from the station. But a million kilometers in the Gamma Layer would become thirty million in the Beta Layer, or nine hundred million down in the Alpha Layer. At a normal cruising speed of maybe a hundred kilometers per second it would take months for a ship to work its way around the fringes of the system without being spotted, and even then they’d be seen the moment they lit their drive. The same problem in reverse meant that a ship fleeing the system would have to pass close to the main station to escape into the Delta Layer.

  “That makes sense,” I said. “But why are there so many ships docked at the station? Shouldn’t they all be heading down into normal space?”

  “Overwatch stations like that usually get used as transshipment points,” she explained. “Bulk cargo shipping is a pretty competitive business, especially the short-haul runs between colonies in the same cluster. I don’t really get the details, but apparently a lot of the time it makes sense to drop off cargo at a central location where other ships can pick it up. They do that in the Gamma Layer, because that way the big bulk cargo ships don’t need to have a hyperspace converter.”

  “The Hoshida system is the main trade port for a dozen or so minor colonies,” a crewman I hadn’t met yet put in. “Of course, that’s all local trade. The Square Deal specializes in longer runs, including a lot of dark colonies where the captain has local contacts. Ah, but a girl your age probably isn’t interested in all that. I’m Dustin Shaw, but everyone calls me Dusty. Welcome aboard, Alice. I expect we’ll be seeing a lot of each ot
her.”

  He was the first man I’d seen who didn’t look like he could break me in half with one hand. He was barely taller than Naoko, and his face was so odd it took me a moment to understand what I was seeing. He looked old. You never saw that on Felicity, even in historical vidshows. It was supposed to be too traumatic for sensitive young kids, or something.

  Funny, but it didn’t seem gross or scary to me. He was obviously healthy. He had all his teeth, and his short brown hair didn’t have any gray in it. He just wasn’t bothering with cosmetic mods to bulk up his muscles or hide his wrinkles.

  The ER system said he was the ship’s quartermaster. Did that make him an officer? Better safe than sorry.

  “Pleased to meet you, sir,” I said. “I’m interested in everything, actually. What’s a dark colony?”

  “Now didn’t I just say everyone calls me Dusty? That includes you, kiddo. Save the ‘sirs’ for when there’s paying customers around.”

  “Oh. Um, thank you, s- Dusty. Sorry, I’m still getting used to things. I figured it’s safer to be too formal than not formal enough.”

  “That’s usually a good bet,” he agreed. “Just don’t turn into a suckup. As for dark colonies, that’s what we call places that are trying to stay off the grid. See, there’s a good half-million systems in the average sector, and this far from Earth that’s almost all uninhabited space. The Kerak sector has about a thousand officially catalogued colonies, but they’re concentrated in forty-odd tight little clusters.”

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  “Well, you’ve got to remember the Outer Sphere wasn’t all colonized at once. The first few colonies grabbed the garden worlds, and some of the sweet industrial spots like the Imris system. The second wave mostly wanted to be close to an established colony, and pretty soon every cluster had at least one big industrial system. At that point it made sense for anyone trying to make money to stick close enough to be part of the freight network. Ships that can use the Delta Layer are thirty times faster than the bulk freighters in the Gamma Layer, but they’re also three or four times more expensive.”