Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1)

by E. William Brown

  The guards retreated to positions flanking the door behind me, which closed. There was a very long moment of silence, that was finally broken by the disembodied voice of an AI.

  “The Merchant’s Association mediation court for Takeo Station is now in session, with the Honorable Representative Stanley Finwell presiding. The court meets on this the seventeenth day of May, 2486, to hear a complaint brought by the Takeo Station Security Directorate, represented by Captain Goro Minami, against Apprentice Spacer Alice Long of the free trader Square Deal, represented by Captain Dan Sokol. Let the hearing commence.”

  Representative Finwell looked down at me disapprovingly. “So this is the young lady at the center of today’s commotion? Well, let’s hear the charge, Captain Minami.”

  “Your Honor, Takeo Station brings complaint of vandalism, destruction of property, arson, obstruction of traffic, reckless deployment of robotic weapons, thirty-seven counts of injury or maiming of serfs, eight counts of serficide, unlicensed possession of military enhancements, trespassing, conspiracy to commit grand theft and aggravated elf torture. In light of the severity of her offenses we demand that she be remanded into station custody for proper trial and sentencing under Hoshidan law.”

  I cringed at that, but Representative Finwell just cocked his head curiously. “Really? On what basis? Nothing in your list of complaints rises to the level of high crimes. Unless you’re claiming that the damages exceed fifty million credits?”

  “No,” Captain Minami grudgingly admitted. “We’re estimating twelve thousand credits, including medical care of the injured serfs. But staging a pitched battle in the middle of a busy expressway smacks of terrorism.”

  Captain Sokol snorted. The Representative turned to him. “Yes, Captain? You have a response to the station’s demand?”

  “It’s absurd,” he said shortly. “The high crimes provision is meant for cases like aggravated piracy, or nuclear sabotage. As you noted, nothing in the list of charges even vaguely approaches that level of severity. Square Deal opposes the station’s motion.”

  “Very well, gentlemen. The motion is denied. You’ll have to make your case here, Captain Minami.”

  “Fine,” he growled. “Takeo Station offers certified security recordings of the expressway incident.”

  A hologram projector hummed to life in the middle of the room, showing a view of the expressway.

  “Ah, good,” the Representative said. “I’ve been wanting to see how this happened.”

  Captain Sokol leaned back, and watched with narrow eyes.

  There were a few seconds of random traffic, before my truck lumbered into view. Floating labels helpfully pointed out my location in the truck’s cab, as well as Smoke and Ash clinging to the roof. Then came the car full of trolls, the rocket launcher, the giant pileup, and finally the reappearance of the car and my final ploy with the loading bot.

  I was surprised at how fast it all went. It had felt like forever when it was happening, but the whole recording was barely two minutes long. When it was done the image froze.

  “Well, that was exciting,” Representative Finwell said mildly. “Let’s work through this. Replay from the beginning. Stop.”

  The image froze with the troll raising that rocket launcher, and Smoke swooping towards the back of the truck.

  “Miss Long, do you know why these trolls were motivated to attack you with a rocket launcher? They seem a bit perturbed.”

  “I don’t know why they went so crazy, Your Honor,” I said. “I was afraid they might try to kill me, or at least catch me again. But I have no idea why they started firing heavy weapons in the middle of an expressway.”

  “Hah! We have the house footage too, you little elf beater,” Captain Minami scoffed. “Does the name Lilia ring a bell?”

  “You mean the con artist who tried to brainjack me? What does she have to do with the trolls going crazy?” I asked.

  “We’ll sort that out in a moment,” Finwell interrupted. “Let’s get through this footage first. Resume. Stop.”

  The scene advanced a few moments. Now the cluster of missiles was in midair, just starting to separate from each other and plot their coordinated evasion patterns. Smoke was at the back of the truck now, his jaws spread wide as a gray cloud billowed out.

  “Miss Long, did you order that bot to deploy a jamming cloud? That is what it’s doing, correct?”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” I answered. “I’ve only had them for a day, but I remembered the specs said it was supposed to be able to block most targeting sensors. I was hoping the missiles would go into safe mode and turn themselves off if they couldn’t get a targeting lock.”

  He gave me a considering look. “You came up with all of that in, what was it, a second and a half?”

  “It was a very long second and a half, Your Honor. I had time for my whole life to flash by my eyes, too.”

  He chuckled. But Captain Minami wasn’t amused.

  “This is what comes of letting children play with military hardware,” he objected. “What are those things, anyway?”

  “They’re a Sakeri Combine personal protection system,” Captain Sokol said. “Square Deal offers their specs into evidence. You’ll find that they’re entirely defensive in nature, and don’t qualify as military bots. In addition to the smoke they can deploy microbot swarms with a variety of subdual agents, but the only way they could actually hurt anyone is by biting them.”

  They spent a few minutes looking over the data and debating it before Captain Minami admitted that they didn’t quite violate any local laws. That surprised me, until I mentally called up my own copy of the documentation and realized there were two different spec sheets. The captain must have given them the one for the civilian version of the system, but the only difference between that and the military version was a software key.

  I decided it would be a bad idea to mention that I could just as easily have loaded them up with nerve gas and disassembler swarms. Or a nanoplague, for that matter. Yeah, I’d just keep my mouth shut here.

  “If these things are a professionally marketed security product, why are they so careless about endangering bystanders?” Minami demanded.

  “Sakeri Combine products are designed to query the local datanet for applicable legal standards,” my captain explained. “They also place a very high priority on the life of their principle, as one would expect of any security bot. At highway speeds a smaller smoke cloud would not have covered the truck long enough to divert that missile attack, and the bot’s scan of its surroundings revealed no entities defined as human by local law. So it concluded there were no bystanders to endanger, and deployed the largest cloud it could generate.”

  “No bystanders? There were more than a hundred serfs in the area!”

  Captain Sokol shrugged. “I believe your judicial precedents set the value of a human’s life above any number of serfs. Don’t blame me for having my bots obey your laws.”

  Minami wasn’t happy about that, and they argued back and forth for a while without getting anywhere. When they finally got back to the recording they spent some time walking through exactly how my smoke cloud had caused the big pileup. Then they went on through the rest of the chase, and there was a collective wince when we got to the part where I plowed the loading bot into the car. The traffic cameras had gotten a much closer look at that than I had, and it was kind of gruesome.

  “There, you see? There was nothing accidental about that!” Captain Minami declared.

  “They were trying to kill her,” Captain Sokol pointed out. “What do you expect her to do, ask them pretty please not to?”

  “Gentlemen, please,” Finwell cut in. “Allow me to clarify a few things. Miss Long, exactly what orders did you give that bot?”

  “I was actually using remote control on it,” I admitted. “But I was really careful not to kill anyone! Look, their heads are all intact. It’s not my fault if the medical teams didn’t bother to revive them. Heck, their brains are probably stil
l viable. Isn’t the limit something like thirty hours at room temperature?”

  “You’re talking about a full-scale nanomedical rebuild,” Captain Minami said. “On cheap mass production trolls? That’s insane. It’s far more cost effective to simply replace them.”

  “Well, excuse me for actually thinking of them as people,” I said.

  “Miss Long, are you offering to pay for your assailants’ medical care?” Finwell asked.

  I sighed. “I don’t have that much money, Your Honor. Besides, it would be pretty stupid to pay for reviving someone who wants to kill me. What if they get it right next time?”

  “Takeo Station’s citizens are the responsibility of the station authorities,” Captain Sokol said. “If the government of Hoshida chooses not to offer standard medical care to its serfs that is not my crew’s concern.”

  That made sense to me, but Minami didn’t agree. They spent the next twenty minutes arguing about it, before Finwell finally cut them off.

  “I believe I’ve heard both of your arguments on this topic, gentlemen. Now, what about the cause of this altercation. You said something about house recordings, Captain Minami?”

  “Yes, but you’d better brace yourself. This is some of the worst footage I’ve seen in years. We also have testimony from one of the house trolls, and that poor elf girl.”

  That didn’t sound good.

  There was a brief snip from the public cameras first, showing Lilia accosting me on the street and then both of us climbing into the truck. Once again there were floating captions, one of which identified Lilia and noted that her owner was deceased.

  “We’ve interrogated the elf in this footage, Your Honor. She reports that her household was suffering deeply from lack of a master, and had sent her out to find a human who would claim them. Miss Long agreed to take advantage of a security loophole to fraudulently claim the late Akio Sato’s assets, hence the conspiracy charge.”

  “I did no such thing!” I protested. “If that’s what she said, then she’s lying.”

  “Then why did you go with her to her address?” Minami demanded.

  “She gave me this whole sob story about how her household was starving because her master hadn’t left enough money in the household account. She looked so pitiful I decided I could spare a few minutes to see if there was a way to help.”

  “What, out of the goodness of your heart?” Minami scoffed.

  “Well, yeah. I do try to be a nice person, and I guess I’m kind of a sucker for cute girls who need help. I’ll admit that she was offering to help me take money out of the accounts for my trouble, but I figured that sounded too much like a scam to be legal. I was planning to find out what the situation was first, and then call my supervisor back on the ship to ask what I should do.”

  “The testimony of a human outweighs that of a serf,” Captain Sokol noted. “Square Deal moves to have Lilia’s testimony stricken from the record.”

  “That would be in keeping with local law,” Representative Finwell said. “But the Association prefers to retain all sources of data on a controversy. Motion denied. Now, let’s see that household footage. Has it been certified?”

  “Unfortunately the estate security system was compromised at some point after Mr. Sato’s death, so our analysts were unable to certify its authenticity. But it was obtained just forty minutes after the events in question, and none of Mr. Sato’s serfs are registered as having any skill at hacking or altering recordings. The Security Directorate believes them to be substantially correct.”

  “Very well, then. Let’s have a look.”

  This time the holographic images had sound, so I got to listen to myself talking with Lilia as we entered the house. Then things got weird. The stun turret shot me, but the conversation between Lilia and the trolls was completely different.

  “Why did the house stun her?” Lilia exclaimed. “She was going to help us!”

  “I don’t know,” Jenki said. “I’d better make sure she’s alright. Good thing I had a medkit on me.”

  “I’ll call down to the security room, and see what’s going on,” Renit said.

  “She’s okay, right? She has to be. Oh, she’s going to be so mad!” Lilia fretted.

  “Her vitals look good,” Jenki assured her. “We’ll just have to apologize when she wakes up. Maybe if we grovel a lot she won’t punish us too bad.”

  Then there was a slight jump, and we were back to the real recording. Funny, I hadn’t realized how dangerous I looked when I was tearing those trolls apart. By the time I grabbed Lilia I was covered in blood. No wonder she was so scared.

  Minami opened his mouth as the recording ended, but I beat him to the punch.

  “That isn’t what happened, Your Honor. That recording has been falsified from timestamp 3:19 to 7:41. If you look close you can even see the jump at 7:41, where the fake images don’t quite match up with the real ones.”

  “Of course you’d say that,” Minami scoffed. “As if anything could justify your abuse of that poor elf. She even told you that you’d tripped her submission reflex, and you threatened her again anyway.”

  Not again. This was just like what Kovy had pulled back on Felicity. Was I always going to lose to the social predators?

  “Why should my crewmember believe a con artist who’d already lured her into an ambush?” Captain Sokol said. “For all Alice knew she wasn’t even a real elf. Alice, can you tell us what really happened?”

  Hope. My captain was standing up for me, and he knew how to win this kind of fight. I didn’t have to do it alone. I just needed to give him something to work with.

  “I can do better than that, sir. Am I allowed to submit a recording? The stunner knocked me out for a bit, but my onboard sensors were running the whole time and I still have the data.”

  “Personal data stores can’t be certified,” Minami objected. “She’s had hours alone in her cell, and we have no idea what skills or software she might have. By now her logs could show anything.”

  Representative Finwell rewound the house recording to 7:30, and played it again until after the jump.

  “She’s right about the discontinuity, Captain Minami. I’m forced to conclude that the household security system was compromised, in which case her personal logs are an equally valid account. Go ahead and show us what you have, Miss Long.”

  A network connection popped up, and I spent a few milliseconds puzzling out how to feed the court AI the data stream I wanted to give it. I really did have recordings of everything my senses had picked up in the last twenty-four hours, but I had to pick out a subset that could be converted into something humans would be able to understand.

  What would Finwell say, if I admitted that this wasn’t coming from a recording device? That I had a perfect memory, and there was an elaborate mechanism in my subconscious that went through all the day’s experiences while I slept looking for lessons to learn? That was sort of like what humans do when they dream, right?

  Yeah, one more thing to keep my mouth shut about.

  “Obviously my eyes were closed most of the time, so the video part of this is from my passive sonar system,” I told everyone. “That’s why everything looks translucent, and there’s no color. But the audio is the important part.”

  My sonar can usually get millimeter resolution off of ambient noise, so the hologram gave us a pretty good view of everyone’s bones and internal organs as well as what they were doing. It was really disturbing, watching Jenki brainjack me all over again. But I reminded myself that Lilia’s talk of rebels and mass murder was the important part.

  Naturally we had to go through it again step by step. I might have been a little pale when Finwell zoomed in on Jenki’s brainhacking device to get a better look at it.

  “Captain Minami, do you have a forensic analysis of the scene to submit? Or at least an inventory of items found there?”

  “That, ah, didn’t seem necessary at the time, Your Honor.”

  “So there may be several
squads of rebels in powered armor at large on the station? I believe the Association is going to be requesting a larger security detail.”

  “But, Your Honor, surely this is absurd. Who would have ordered these serfs to form some kind of, of rebel terrorist cell? That’s conspiracy theorist talk.”

  “There are at least three interstellar organizations that foment serf rebellions in the Kerak sector, and there are plenty of captains who would collaborate with them for the right price,” Representative Finwell said severely. “I suggest you take this information seriously. Is the elf still in custody?”

  Minami consulted his datapad. “She was ordered to return home, and remain there until further notice.”

  I had to facepalm at that. “So she’s long gone by now. Heck, her group had hours to pack up all their gear and move it someplace else.”

  “No doubt.” Representative Finwell gave an aggravated sigh. “But this does give us an easy method of verifying your story. Captain Minami, please have your people check the elf’s status.”

  It took all of two minutes for station security to determine that Lilia wasn’t answering her com, and neither was anyone else at the house. Confirming that the place was abandoned didn’t take much longer.

  “So much for her facade of innocence,” Finwell said. “Miss Long, I take it her mention of marines was the reason for your rather aggressive methods of motivating Lilia during your escape?”

  “Yes, Your Honor. I was terrified that they’d catch up to me before I could get away. I can handle a troll or two in hand to hand, but I can’t scratch a suit of powered armor. I didn’t even have any weapons on me, and my security bots are pretty much all defense.”

  “I still find this tale of rebel serfs hard to believe,” Minami grumbled. “In any event, torturing a helpless elf is-”

  Captain Sokol slammed his fist down. “Enough about the damned elf. Your Honor, Alice Long is a fourteen year old girl who was officially emancipated just this morning. I allowed her to run some errands on the station because Hoshida is supposed to be a civilized system, where a young lady can go about her business without fear of criminals. Instead I find that she’s been assaulted, held against her will, brainjacked and targeted for murder by Hoshidan residents. And where was station security in all this? Instead of coming to her aid, you arrest her and lock her in an isolation cell before dragging her into court on trumped-up charges.”