Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1)

by E. William Brown

  He glared at Captain Minami, who at least had the grace to look embarrassed.

  “Your Honor, Square Deal moves to dismiss all charges with prejudice, and censure Takeo Station for bringing frivolous complaints before the court. You can be sure we’ll be filing an official incident report and list of complaints with the Merchant’s Association as well, along with an advisory about this potential serf revolt.”

  Finwell turned to Minami. “Does Takeo Station have any further evidence to present?”

  The security captain clenched his fists. “No, Your Honor.”

  “Then I’m forced to grant Square Deal’s motion, Captain. Your investigative work was badly bungled, and your case is an ill-conceived hatchet job. This court finds that Alice Long acted with admirable restraint in defense of her own life, and suffers no liability for today’s events. She will be released to her ship immediately.”

  I sighed in relief.

  “Sadly, Hoshida’s treaty with the Merchant’s Association does not support censuring station security for bungled investigative work. But you can rest assured, Captain Minami, that the Association will be taking a very close look at your directorate’s work until we are assured that this was an isolated incident. This court does not condone persecuting spacers based on obviously falsified evidence.”

  “Fine,” Captain Minami spat. “But there’s still one thing I can do to keep this menace from hurting any more elves. Alice Long, consider yourself banned from Takeo Station until further notice. I’m sure my commander will make it official by the time you get back to your ship.”

  I found myself staring at him stupidly while the court adjourned. Really? That’s all he cared about? I mean, sure, I felt kind of bad about having to hurt Lilia like that. But ten minutes with an autodoc and she’d be good as new. Her buddies had tried to blow me up with a rocket launcher!

  Captain Sokol came down from his seat, and put his hand on my shoulder. “Come along, Alice. Let’s get back to the ship.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I got up, and followed him out of the courtroom. This wasn’t the place to talk. I stayed quiet until we reached the car he’d taken from the ship, and climbed in.

  It was a really fancy car. Seating for six, an armored hull, an oversized lift system, even a deflector shield and what were probably hidden weapons. But I was too upset to admire the hardware.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I said miserably. “I didn’t mean to cause so much trouble.”

  The car started itself, and pulled out of the parking lot. The captain turned a concerned look my way.

  “It’s not your fault, Alice. I’m sorry you had to go through all of that. But you handled yourself quite well.”

  “I keep feeling like I should have done better,” I told him. “I didn’t mean for anyone to die!”

  “Sometimes there’s no other choice,” he said gravely. “Especially when people are trying to kill you. Do you think things would be better if they’d succeeded?”

  “Of course not! I just feel really stupid, and frustrated. I was trying so hard to be useful, so you wouldn’t regret taking me on. But instead I’ve wasted a bunch of your time and left Naoko in the lurch.”

  “Naoko should not have sent you off to wander around a strange station by yourself. No matter how talented you are you’re still inexperienced. Someone needs to teach you how to avoid trouble, and spot con artists.”

  “Yes, sir. I feel pretty dumb about falling for Lilia’s story.”

  “Noted. If she’d been telling the truth, were you really going to pass up the chance to empty some dead slaver’s bank account?”

  “Of course not, sir. I was going to call Naoko, and ask her if we could get away with it.”

  “Thought so.” He smiled, and mussed my hair. “You did fine, little imp. Are you alright? Those idiots in station security didn’t try to interrogate you, did they?”

  “No, I’m fine, sir. My immune system ate the brainjack, and I’ve already healed the bruises I got from falling down when I was stunned. I’m just starving. I’m supposed to be putting away at least eight or nine thousand calories a day until my malnutrition warnings clear up, and I haven’t eaten since this morning.”

  “I think we can take care of that.”

  When we arrived at the ship he led me up to the mess hall himself. I was a little flattered that he was so worried about me. Although I was also wondering where Naoko was. I’d expected to see her in the cargo bay, but it was deserted except for the bots. Was she mad at me, for not being around to help her all day?

  That mystery was resolved when we got to the mess hall. There were streamers hung from the ceiling, and a big sign that read ‘Banned from Takeo Station!’ Half the crew was standing around with little party hats on their heads, waiting for me.

  “Surprise!” Lina called, popping out of the galley with a huge cake in her hands.

  Mina darted out of the crowd to hug me. “Congratulations, Alice! I think this is some kind of record. You got recorded as a crewmember, got into your first shootout and got banned from a station all in one day!”

  “Um, is that a good thing?” I asked tentatively.

  “You’re not a real spacer until you’ve been banned from a station,” Lina assured me.

  “Yeah, you’re officially cooler than Naoko now,” Jenna agreed. “But we’re going to have to do something about that naïveté. Really, falling for a modified Nigerian email scam? That’s such a classic I thought everyone knew it.”

  “Apparently they don’t teach the art of the con in orphanages on Felicity,” the captain said. “Can I trust you girls to take care of this gap in our cabin girl’s education?”

  All four foxgirls goggled at him for a moment, before sprouting huge grins.

  “You bet, Captain!” Jenna assured him.

  “Without getting a bounty on her head,” he added.

  They just grinned wider. “Aw, we’re a lot better than we were back then Captain. Don’t worry, we won’t get caught. Alice can’t just switch bodies like we do, so we can’t take any chances.”

  Naoko managed to push through the crowd of foxgirls to hug me. “Welcome home, Alice. Are you alright? Were you injured? We’ve been forced to make do with second-hand information from the bots, and it appears that they missed part of the action.”

  “I’m fine, Naoko. Really. The brainjack didn’t work-”

  “That’s another three coolness points,” Mina interjected.

  “-and I handled the trolls without getting hurt.”

  “There was another fight we missed?” Kara said. “What happened? Can we see? You do have a flight recorder, right?”

  The captain put his hand on my shoulder. “Why don’t you show them the highlights, Alice? I need to get back to the bridge, but you enjoy your party. Jim, could I have a word?”

  “You have recordings? Awesome! Come on, girl. Sit yourself down in the seat of honor, and queue it up while we cut the cake.”

  “Yeah. But only the parts that make you look cool, right?”

  I spent the rest of the evening there, surrounded by new friends, stuffing myself with amazing food while we laughed and joked and traded stories. Everyone in the crew seemed to have a lot of those, and I found myself playing a few more recordings to keep up. Naoko’s encounter with the hexagator. Some highlights from my trip across Felicity’s jungles. It wasn’t much compared to Chief West’s war stories, or the foxgirls’ adventures as aspiring data thieves. But it was enough to make me feel like maybe, somehow, I might actually fit in here.

  Chapter 9

  It was a three-day trip to Zanfeld, and I got to spend most of it learning and hanging out with the techs.

  The passengers all retreated into their suites once we left port, just like Naoko had predicted. She was still kept pretty busy fielding customer service requests, since the Hoshidans were a bunch of spoiled brats who expected to indulge any weird whim they might get 24/7. But she was just helping their serfs make things happen,
so it was a manageable job.

  I helped out now and then by answering the com when she was busy, but I never saw the passengers face to face. The few times I talked to their serfs they all seemed terrified of me. I couldn’t quite decide whether to feel vindicated or annoyed. I wanted to be dangerous, but darn it, I wasn’t some monster who went around hurting harmless serf girls.

  Jenna advised me to ignore the whole thing.

  “Once we drop these people off on Zanfeld you’ll never see them again, so who cares what they think? Spacers aren’t going to react like that, if they bother to look into your history at all. That reminds me, though, we need to get you signed up with an agitprop service.”

  “A what?” She’d completely lost me with that one.

  “She’s talking about search obfuscators,” Mina explained. “You know, so people can’t just do a datanet search on your ID code and get your whole life story?” She paused to take in my expression. “You’ve got no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

  “Not a clue,” I admitted. “Why wouldn’t I want people to be able to do searches on me? Shouldn’t I want a good reputation?”

  “Yeah, but you don’t want to get convicted for it,” Jenna said.

  “Exactly,” Mina said. “A lot of colonies have really crazy laws, Alice. If your personal history isn’t obfuscated some of them will accept public data as legal evidence, and that’s bad. Say you go to a club on Zanfeld and have a few drinks, and someone posts a video somewhere. Then three months later you leave the port zone on Clarity, and some bored cop decides to harass you and runs a crime search. Bam, now you’re in a local jail on drug use charges.”

  “They’d arrest me for something I did in another colony?”

  “Reasonable people wouldn’t, but the crazy colonies can get really crazy. A big part of our business is going places the big corporations won’t touch, so we have to be careful about that kind of thing.”

  “Besides, it’s fun,” Jenna added. “Open accounts with a couple of agitprop services, and they’ll spread any crazy stories you want. Usually what you do is have them create five or six separate false histories for you, each with a different personality. Make sure one of them includes lots of really outrageous fake crime reports, and you can claim anything real is obviously part of this malicious character assassination.”

  “Or you could just have them manufacture legitimate doubt about your activities,” Mina added. “The captain pays a service to tamper with public data about the Square Deal, and they’ll automatically include you in the basic obscurement. So, for example, in a month there will be a bunch of different versions of the news stories about yesterday floating around different data stores, and the key details will all contradict each other. There will also be data showing the Square Deal being in three or four other ports at the same time, and probably some completely fake news reports to go along with the false trails.”

  “Yeah, but it’s a lot more fun when you can tell them what kind of reports to post,” Jenna said. “For that you have to open an account of your own.”

  “That sounds expensive,” I protested. “I don’t have a lot of money.”

  “It’s not that bad. They have specialized AIs that do all the work, and they’re just class two’s so their time is cheap. You can get a basic account for maybe two or three credits a month.”

  “I guess I’ll look into it.”

  The techs filled me in on a lot of things I’d never known. I kind of felt like they were babysitting me, but they didn’t seem to mind. I think they got a kick out of educating a human.

  They didn’t just lecture me about things, either. They got really excited when I mentioned that I was interested in engineering, and after that they made a habit of dragging me all over the ship’s engineering spaces to ‘help out’ while we chatted about everything from merchant law to spacer fashion.

  I’m pretty sure a normal girl would have hated the giant maze of cold, dark passages that tunneled in and around the giant machines that made the Square Deal run. I loved it. The tech’s domain was full of amazing sights, especially to my senses. I got to watch them service a drive tube, and rebuild a fusion reactor’s fuel injector, and all kinds of other cool stuff. I didn’t know enough to be much help yet, but even holding Jenna’s tools while she worked was fascinating.

  The first time we did that I had to spend the whole time in my spacesuit, since the parts of engineering that weren’t in vacuum had a nitrogen atmosphere to minimize corrosion. It was also pretty cold in places, since the ship’s holds and idle systems were kept at a chilly six degrees Celsius. Active systems like the fusion reactors and navigational deflectors were a lot warmer, but they made up a pretty small fraction of the ship.

  This, of course, was why the foxgirls used synthetic bodies instead of organic ones like Naoko. They wore light skinsuits on the job, and their athletic builds were put to good use clambering over giant machines and shimmying in and out of tight spaces. The environment didn’t faze them at all, and they usually didn’t even bother turning on the lights. They all had high-res radar systems, and unlike me they could afford to run them constantly.

  “I really hope I get some kind of power source online soon,” I grumbled at one point. “Even eating the way I do, food just doesn’t give me enough energy to run stuff like that. If you stopped emitting I’d have to find my way out on passive sonar, and some of these spaces are so quiet that would be hard to do.”

  “Oh, quit your bitching,” Jenna shot back. “Do you have any idea how amazing it is that you can see with someone else’s radar? Especially a synthetic aperture system like we use. Whoever wrote your sensor algorithms was a frickin’ genius.”

  I chuckled. “I guess you’re right. It’s just annoying to have to watch every watt of energy use.”

  “I bet you’ll grow a power cell now that you’re eating right. You’re obviously meant to be an engineer, or maybe a super-soldier, and either way not having a good onboard power source would be crazy. But if you’re in a hurry I guess you could always add a sensor pack to your suit like a normal person.”

  I took her advice on that, since my suit had plenty of reserve power and fabbing up a radar module turned out to be cheap. But I found that I wasn’t crazy about relying on tools for something that essential, so I hoped she was right about the power cell.

  By then I’d gained back the weight that I’d lost during my long trek through Felicity’s jungles, and the supplements were starting to have an effect. A lot of new interfaces were popping up in my head, giving me better control over features that had been limping along on some kind of emergency backup programming. One of those new modules even let me set priorities for my own physical development.

  Unfortunately it didn’t show me what I was going to look like when I finished growing, or give me a list of all the mods that were still developing, or anything practical like that. But just the fact that I could assure it I’d have a plentiful food supply for the immediate future was a big deal. I could feel the foundations being laid for all sorts of ambitious projects, some of which would make me a lot harder to kill. Being a spacer did seem to be a bit dangerous, so I was glad of that.

  I could also sort of point out recent experiences that I thought might keep happening, and challenges I needed to adapt to quickly. I spent some time playing with that feature in between training classes one night, with interesting results. The next morning I met Mina with my helmet stowed, and a big grin on my face.

  She paused at the airlock into engineering. “Don’t forget your helmet, Alice.”

  “I don’t need it anymore,” I crowed. “I got my respirocytes in last night.”

  “Respirocytes?” I watched her access the ship’s datanet to do a search. “Oh, an internal air supply?”

  “That’s right. I had a classic Freitas-style system in my design database. I can store about a four-hour oxygen supply now. I’ll deploy my helmet if I run low, but I wanted to see what Engineering smells like.
”

  She smiled tolerantly. “A keen sense of smell can be a surprisingly useful diagnostic tool. Alright, Alice, but don’t push yourself. You don’t take chances with life support. I want you back in your helmet if you drop below an hour of reserve air.”

  “No problem, Mina. Don’t worry, I’ll be careful. I really like being able to go into the tunnels with you guys. I’m not going to mess that up.”

  “Sounds like our insidious plan is working, then. At this rate we’ll turn you into a techie in no time.”

  I liked the sound of that. Maybe I could get qualified as an engineering tech, and do this kind of work for a living? I was still working through fifteen or twenty hours of classes a day, taking advantage of my VR tank’s fast-play feature to zip through the content at triple speed. The piloting and navigation classes were fun, but they were so easy it was hard to see them as serious subjects. Engineering, on the other hand, was something I could really sink my teeth into. The introductory courses were mostly about how to manage automated maintenance systems, since all the routine work on a ship is done by bots. But once you get beyond the basics you have to actually understand how things work, and that was a huge topic. I could spend years studying it and still barely scratch the surface.

  The idea of tackling something that hard, and eventually mastering it, was exhilarating. Especially since I wouldn’t be on my own. The foxgirls were obviously happy to give advice, and even explain things the lessons didn’t cover. Unfortunately there were also downsides.

  “Most humans think of engineering as something the techs take care of,” Kara advised me one afternoon, after I’d brought up my career options.