Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1)

by E. William Brown

  After hours of practice I finally got the hang of the command UI the Square Deal used, and started customizing the macro functions. I kept a second thread of attention digging through the options and working on improvements all afternoon, and that was totally worth it. It turned out there was a way to show more than the normal three camera views at once, and I could also pull up other sensors and even open multiple connections.

  Trying to make sense of twenty or thirty different camera views at once wasn’t easy, especially since the bots didn’t all use the same sensors. The breaching bots were pretty good at close range, with a wide field of view all the way from deep IR to high UV frequencies, but they were terribly nearsighted. The gunbots had a narrower field of view, but they had magnification up to x50 and decent radio direction finding. The recon drones, minesweepers, shieldbots and support bots all had their own specialties, and I ended up with a horrible headache from trying to integrate all the data they fed me.

  I had nightmares that night. I was locked in a coffin, blind and wrapped up in capture web so I couldn’t move a cem, and something terrible was coming for me. The only protection I had was a bunch of bumbling bots that spent more time running into each other and wandering in circles than they did shooting at the enemy. That made sense, though, because they were practically blind. Each one had a single camera that looked out through a long straw, so they had a tiny field of view, and they could only see one color. All the enemy had to do was paint their units blue, and I wouldn’t be able to see them. Wait, don’t assassin bots have chameleon skin?

  I woke with a start, my heart racing.

  A warm body snuggled up next to me. Strong arms embraced me, and Emla’s breath tickled my ear.

  “It’s just a dream, Alice. I’m on watch. You can rest now.”

  It felt so good to have someone hold me. I relaxed into her embrace, and drifted back off to sleep.

  In the morning some inner sense informed me that I now had built-in VR support. I stared at the notice for a moment, yawning and blinking stupidly. Then I realized what it meant, and broke into a grin.

  No more being locked in a VR pod!

  I logged in to the chief’s training environment, and it fed me a viewpoint of the virtual ready room where I could inspect the bots and study while I waited for him to log in. But I was still in my body, too, and I wasn’t locked in that cramped little pod with its armor blocking my view. I grinned, and sat up to stretch.

  “You look happy,” Emla said.

  I looked down at her, and realized she was naked under the covers. Naked, and not worried at all about covering herself.

  I felt my face heat, and looked away hurriedly. Don’t think about the fact that she was holding me for half the night, with nothing between us but my flimsy nightgown. Distraction, I needed a distraction.

  “My VR support grew in,” I told her. “No more spending all day in a pod for me! Come on, let’s get cleaned up so we can get down to the mess hall. The techs are doing breakfast today.”

  “We wouldn’t want to miss that,” she agreed. “But doesn’t your training start at 07:00? That’s only thirty minutes from now.”

  “So? I’ll have to keep most of my attention on the training, I guess. But I can still eat and stuff.”

  “That’s my mistress,” she said, a note of pride in her voice. She swept the sheets off, and rolled out of bed.

  “In that case, that sounds like a great plan,” she went on. “I still can’t believe I get to eat fancy human food now. I’m never going to get enough.”

  She offered her hand, and I let her help me up even though I didn’t need it. I still felt a little shy, but she wasn’t staring. I tried to focus on her cheerful chatter, and not look too much. Even if she was just casually showing off everything as she led me to the bathroom, my hand still in hers.

  Her humanoid form was exactly the same height as me, and looked about the same age. If the last few days were typical she ate like me, too. Was that all on purpose? I guess it did make me a little more comfortable with her, but why would she want to look so young? She’d been fabbed as an adult, and then worked in that reactor for years.

  I was broken out of my musing when she kissed the tip of my nose.

  “Huh?”

  She giggled. “There you are. What are you worrying about, Alice?”

  “I, um, well.” My face was turning red again. What was I going to say? I took a deep breath, and tried to push through the embarrassment. “I know you’re… and most people would, um… but I’m not…”

  She put her finger over my lips, and smiled at me. “Silly Alice. Haven’t you realized yet that I’m synced with you? I know what a human usually does with her companion androids, but it’s all theory to me. I’m not going to want any of that until you do.”

  I frowned. “What? But, you weren’t a kid before.”

  She shrugged. “I’ve never had a body that was fully functional before. At the reactor I barely had a sense of touch anywhere but my hands and feet. So it’s not like I gave up anything. I…”

  She looked away, and for the first time I realized that her fearless lack of embarrassment might be partly an act.

  “I was hoping maybe we could learn together?” She said hesitantly. “About hugs, and cuddling, and then someday about… other things.”

  My heart went out to her. I pulled her into a hug.

  “I’d like that,” I admitted. “I’m not sure about… things. But hugs are pretty awesome. We can start there, and work our way up.”

  She hugged me back. Her body was lean and firm, her skin smooth as silk against mine. I found myself wondering what it would feel like to run my hands over it. To hold her against me, and kiss her.

  But this wasn’t the time to deal with all the confusing feelings I got when I thought about things like that. I let her go, and turned to the shower.

  “Wash my back?” I asked.

  “You bet!” She eagerly agreed.

  We made it to the mess hall just as the techs were serving up the first helpings of another exotic ethnic breakfast. I’d never heard of Nuevo Hidalgo before, let alone eaten their food. But it smelled delicious. Breadstick things with sausage and cheese baked into them. Fresh tortillas, and bowls full of egg, cheese, grilled vegetables and crumbled sausage to fill them with. Thick slabs of bacon with a sweet sauce drizzled over them. My taste buds were in heaven.

  Chief West looked amused when he logged in to the training environment. “I see someone has figured out a new trick.”

  “Good morning, Chief,” I said cheerfully. “I’m getting much better fidelity like this. Can you believe the VR pod was rendering actual pixels, instead of just feeding image data into my visual cortex? Talk about a waste of processing power.”

  “That is how normal VR systems work,” he replied. “Are you running two instances of yourself now, or what?”

  I hesitated. Part of me wanted to keep hiding everything. But I had a good feeling about him. Besides, it’s not like an infomorph had any room to freak out about my little quirks.

  “I think I’m actually like those AIs that can run a whole ship by themselves,” I admitted. “I can give at least five or six different things my full attention at the same time, without having to make copies of myself.”

  “Really? I thought you had a normal brain in there, not one of those electronic replacements.”

  “I, um, I think that’s actually some kind of camouflage, Chief. Or maybe the organic me keeps the electronic side calibrated? The interface is so smooth it all feels like there’s only one of me, but I can see things that happen a lot faster than neurons can fire. Only I can’t get too carried away with that, because if I overclock myself too much my cooling can’t keep up with the waste heat.”

  I added that last part because I figured admitting a weakness would make me seem less threatening. But he didn’t seem bothered at all. He just nodded, and took it in stride.

  “I figured you had something like that. Sometimes
you’re a little slow getting your bots moving the way you want, but your personal reaction time is always too fast for the system to measure. We’ll have to see what we can do to take advantage of that. But don’t get cocky, because today we’re taking you out of easy mode.”

  Yesterday was easy mode? Oh, discord.

  This time he gave me twice as many bots, and had me try to board a wrecked pirate ship. I gave it a good try, but I lost a good third of my force just boarding the ship and establishing a decent beachhead. Then the enemy decided it was hopeless, and the pirates abandoned ship and set off a suicide charge. I ‘died’ with the ship, which was pretty embarrassing.

  The rest of the day was more of the same. One fight after another, always with some new problem I had to figure out how to handle, and nine times out of ten something went unexpectedly wrong halfway through the mission. My extraction team lost a drop ship on the way down. My intel on the enemy turned out to be totally wrong. My commander changed the mission halfway through, or something critical about the situation changed.

  It was frustrating. Really, really frustrating. It felt like Chief West was cheating, changing the rules on me whenever it looked like I might win. But my instincts told me that real fights were always like that. The other guy never just stands there and lets you beat him. He fights back, and he doesn’t fight fair if he has a choice about it. Things go wrong, sometimes horribly wrong, and complaining about it doesn’t help. You adapt, and find a way to get the mission done anyway. Or you die, and your civilians pay the price for your failure. That’s the nature of war.

  It was exhilarating.

  All my life, the matrons had told me to be a good girl. Be nice to everyone. Cooperate, and be a meek little herd animal. Violence was unthinkable in their fragile little world.

  My third mission of the day started out with the enemy nuking the Square Deal while we were grounded at their spaceport. The bots I commanded were loaded up with tactical nukes and Californium rounds, and my mission was to fight my way across the city to capture the command bunker for the enemy’s ground-based space defenses so we could take off without getting blown out of the sky. By the time the battle was done half a million simulated civilians were dead, and their city was a smoking ruin. But I captured the darned bunker, and as I watched the ship lift I looked out over the devastation and realized I felt good about it.

  They’d sprung a completely unwarranted ambush on us, and I’d made them pay for it. That was the kind of accomplishment I could be proud of. At the orphanage I’d struggled to make myself care about gardening methods and the habits of obscure animal species. But here, on the battlefield, I felt at home.

  It counted as a failure, of course. I was supposed to get myself back on board before the ship lifted, and there was no way that was happening with half an armored brigade between me and the spaceport. But I’d do better next time.

  The next day’s assignments weren’t any easier. But slowly, one step at a time, I was learning how to do this. How to command a force of bots by giving them orders and knowing what they’d do to carry them out, instead of trying to watch their every move. How to surf through the torrent of sensor data they provided and pick out the observations that mattered. How to guess what the enemy was up to, and turn the tables on him.

  My development manager was also cheating mercilessly, of course. By the third day of training I’d somehow grown a whole new software module, that let me integrate all my sensor feeds into a coherent model of the combat zone. It was like having a giant 3D model in my head, that showed the whole battlefield in perfect detail. Enemies were in focus when I could see them, and blurred into an uncertain cloud of possible locations when I couldn’t. The smallest clue was enough to tell me where an enemy bot had gone, and even when there weren’t any clues I always knew how far they could have gotten since I’d last seen them.

  In the cat-and-mouse game of urban warfare that was an incredible advantage, and it got me my first real victory. I was supposed to be taking out the reactors on a station we were docked with, when twenty minutes into the fight I realized that the squad that had just popped up to block my advance had to be the one that had been guarding the enemy control room earlier. So I threw my reserves into the opening, and five minutes later my bots were blowing the enemy commander’s brains out all over his console.

  “Now that’s how you do it,” Chief West said gruffly. “Take out the mind, and the bodies don’t matter.”

  Naturally, he just gave me harder scenarios after that.

  First I got to pick out powered armor for myself, which would have been great except it meant that I wasn’t just an abstract target anymore. I had to actually move to keep up with my bots when we were fighting, while giving orders at the same time. I guess that was why the virtual UI had a voice-driven mode, but even so I couldn’t imagine running a squad competently without my multitasking ability.

  It was terribly tempting to pop up and take a shot with my own weapons now and then, instead of having my bots do everything. But I knew Chief West was just waiting for me to make a rookie mistake like that, so I resisted the temptation. Good thing, since that was when he started adding more bot types to the mix.

  I got assassin bots with stealth suites almost as good as my own, and little bomb bots that were equally hard to spot. Specialized sensor bots were the counter to those, and once they were enabled I finally convinced the VR to give me a better view as well. There were engineering bots that could repair battle damage and do demolition. There were electronic warfare swarms that could fan out and listen for enemy radio traffic, so I could target them from a distance. There were bots with rapid-fire grenade launchers, artillery bots that could loft shells high over a battlefield, and a million options for exotic ammunition.

  On the fourth day of training I had enough of a handle on it all that the chief started letting me pick my own troops again. Just my escort team at first, then a few more in each scenario, until finally I was picking my whole team. Of course, the jerk couldn’t let me do that after he told me the mission. No, I had to decide on my core team before I found out what I was supposed to do next. Then I could switch out one squad for something different, but I only had two minutes to decide what to take.

  I’d barely gotten used to that when he started throwing the crazy stuff at me.

  First it was an enemy that had bots made of liquid metal. Their performance kind of sucked compared to normal warbots, but shooting holes in them didn’t do anything. I had to roast them with flamers or defocused lasers to destroy the nanotech that made them work, and that was a mission where I’d gone heavy on gunbots. Ugh.

  Then there was an enemy that used swarms of bioweapons instead of bots. The little gnat things that covered lenses with paint and excreted glue into the joints of my bots were annoying as heck.

  It kept getting weirder after that. Animated smoke clouds. Transforming bots. Suicide bots full of gray goo. Swarms of microbots that could assemble to make bigger bots. Funky weapons, from particle beams to sound cannons. Bots that surrounded themselves with holographic decoys. Bots that looked like scary movie monsters, or innocent little kids.

  The chief just laughed when I complained about that one.

  “You think no one in the galaxy uses psychological warfare?” He said. “There are colonies that specialize in it, kid. The enemy’s mind is the real target, and shit like this lets you hit him through his own sensor feeds. You’re rattled now, right? No amount of tanks would have done that.”

  I hated to admit it, but he was right. Out in the real world I ran my hands through my hair, and tried to get my emotions under control.

  “Yes, Chief. But if someone does that to me for real, I’m going to kill him.”

  “That’s the spirit, kid. Yeah, that’s exactly what you should do. With millions of colonies in known space all fighting for survival you get some crazy people out there, building shit that would turn anyone’s stomach. The best way to discourage the sickos is to terminate
them with extreme prejudice whenever you find them.”

  ‘Extreme prejudice’ meant ‘nuke them till they glow, and don’t worry about bystanders’. Usually I was a little hesitant about going that far, but not this time.

  The weirdness got worse instead of better, though. Humanity has had nanotech for four hundred years, and when you can theoretically build any crazy thing you can think of people try out a lot of exotic ideas. To hear the chief tell it there were whole schools of military thought that focused on winning by throwing so many surprises at the enemy that he can’t cope.

  “That’s why exotic enemies are part of the basic curriculum,” he explained. “We’re only scratching the surface of what people have come up with over the years. But conventional forces outperform everything else if you know how to use them correctly. That’s why the major powers all build conventional bot armies, instead of something like utility fog or transformer swarms. Once we’re done you’ll have at least seen every major category of hardware that’s out there, and have some idea how to react to it.”

  He hesitated. “Well, every category but one. I think you’re a little young to deal with eromorphs, and that’s an optional module anyway. Hardly anyone uses them.”

  I looked up the word, and blushed. “Sex monsters? People really do that?”

  “Not anymore. Stuff like that doesn’t work on bots, and these days the troopers are always in powered armor. The main thing to watch out for is infiltrators, like that elf you ran into back in Hoshida. That type will surrender the first chance they get, and then try to seduce you once they’re a prisoner. It’s an easy way to get a trooper alone to use mind control tech on him, and even professionals can fall for it sometimes.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, Chief.”

  I was doing a lot better by then. I could make my bots do any standard maneuver with just a few clicks in the virtual UI, and when that fell short I knew how to get what I wanted with a minimum of instruction. I was finally getting decent at keeping track of what the enemy was doing, and I was starting to get a feel for Chief West’s tactics. I’d won a couple more missions, and the ones I lost were a lot closer than before.