Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1)

by E. William Brown

  “Is that a problem?” I asked.

  She sighed. “Alice, a tech is a type of serf on most colonies. Think about that for a minute.”

  I did. That led me to look a few things up, and do some more thinking.

  “Androids can be fabbed, and the Merchant Association lets captains adopt whatever sapience recognition rules they like aboard their own ships,” I finally said. “So, do most ships just fab their engineering crew? That would be a lot cheaper than hiring people, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes. Now, what does that mean for a human who wants to study engineering?”

  That seemed obvious enough. “If I’m doing a tech’s job people will treat me like a tech. I’ll never make any money that way. Only, when I search the open source database for tech designs the results I get all have class two or three AIs. Wouldn’t it be really dumb to try to run a ship without a human or a class four to supervise?”

  “It depends on your line of business. My pack sisters and I could easily keep an unmodified cargo ship running, especially if we had the manufacturer’s skill packs. But older ships can be balky, and damage control is a nightmare. A lot of major corporations run ships with no human crew at all, but anyone who ventures into Dark Space or deals with the wrong side of the law is going to want an engineer with human levels of creativity on board. Of course, the production of class four AIs is banned on almost all colonies that practice serfdom. They’re a lot harder to keep under control than class threes, and a lot more dangerous if they rebel.”

  “I get it. So if I ever left the Square Deal I’d be stuck supervising a crew of serfs who belong to someone else, and I’d have no way to free them. Or else I’d have to hold out for a ship that actually pays their engineering crew, and that means I’d lose all my bargaining power and have to settle for whatever jobs I could get. That sucks. But I wouldn’t have to leave the Square Deal, would I? I like working with you guys, and it seems like the ship could use more crew.”

  She hugged me. “You’re such a sweetheart, Alice. If you end up getting certified for engineering we’ll be happy to have you. I just want you to explore all your options before you commit to anything. No one is expecting you to become an expert spacer overnight.”

  I had to admit she had a point. What else was there to study, though? The merchant classes were so boring I nearly fell asleep the first time I tried one. There were a million specialized classes on stuff like cargo handling and underway replenishment, but I couldn’t see making a career out of something like that. The only topic that really seemed as deep as engineering was security.

  Good girls aren’t supposed to resort to violence.

  I wasn’t exactly a good girl, though, was I? I hunted animals, and I’d already managed to get myself into three different fights. Besides, hadn’t I already decided all that preaching from the matrons was just another way to turn kids into sheep? I was a predator, darn it. It would be perfectly natural for me to study how to fight.

  I still felt dirty just looking at the titles of those classes. Why were there so many of them, anyway? The ship’s library had more than a thousand modules just on unarmed combat. Do normal people need to be taught how to put someone in a joint lock? Weird.

  I tried one anyway, and it turned out to be even worse than that. Apparently normal people need to be taught how to throw a punch, how to fall down without getting hurt, and a million other things that seemed blindingly obvious to me. Then they had to practice doing the same thing over and over and over and over again, like it was too complicated to just pick up the first time?

  Ugh.

  I skipped ahead to the exam at the end of the class, and sure enough I aced it without even trying. Okay, not wasting any more of my time on that nonsense. What else was there?

  Marksmanship classes. Lots of them. Yeah, same deal as the martial arts. Although it was interesting to see just how bad normal people are at putting rounds into a target. My physics sense always tells me exactly where a moving object is going to end up, and it interlinks with my kinesthetics and motor center to give me basically perfect aim. Apparently that was unusual.

  Twelve hundred modules on actual security, as opposed to fighting. How to set up everything from shipboard air monitoring systems to mobile sniper interceptors, how all these systems worked, how to penetrate them and how to spot people trying to sneak things past, and more complicated stuff I couldn’t make heads or tails of. Alright, that might actually be interesting. It might also make me really paranoid, though.

  Military history. Someone must have thought that was important, because there were hundreds of classes on topics going all the way back to old Earth’s ancient history. I bit my lip. That sounded really…

  Interesting? Dirty? Embarrassing?

  I pushed aside the whirl of confused feelings, and went on to the next subject. Space combat.

  Oh, wow. Lots of classes, but that was the boring part. There were simulators. Hundreds of them. I could play as anything from a gunner aboard a tramp freighter, to an admiral for one of the great powers of the Inner Sphere. All in simulators rated for training-quality realism!

  Pretending to kill people would be really evil, wouldn’t it? I should feel bad about it. But I probably wouldn’t, and that would feel even worse. Wait, there were sims about the Kami War. I could pretend to shoot space Nazis without feeling guilty, couldn’t I?

  If I was going to live on a spaceship it was only logical to learn something about space battles. The Kami War ended just eight years ago, so that was recent enough that the technology would be about the same. It would be educational.

  Eleven hours later I’d finally gotten the hang of piloting a fast attack boat, at least with the difficulty turned down. Most of the small craft in that war had been bots, which the Swarmlords had cranked out by the billion in their automated factories. But the Dominion expeditionary force had fielded some sweet little ships in the ten thousand-ton range, with an interesting variety of payloads. I had to admit the Mirai Kingdom had some amazing looking hardware too, although I hadn’t quite worked up the nerve to try it out. Pretending to fight for the bad guys would be kind of weird, wouldn’t it?

  At any rate, it had taken some real work to get the hang of fighting my way through the swarms of interceptors and sniper platforms that always surrounded an enemy fleet. I’d finally managed to break through, though, and I was lining up an attack run on a Rakurai class strike cruiser. The long, slender ship was pointed towards the station I was supposed to be defending, its spinal mount RKKV cannon firing off another two-kilogram projectile at just below the speed of light. But they’d have to run a cooling cycle before they could fire again, to bleed off the megatons of waste heat produced by the weapon. The huge cloud of superheated coolant boiling away would mask me from their weapons for just long enough to make my attack.

  I deployed my last plasma bubble to block any laser fire the interceptors behind me might turn my way, and slammed my drive to full power the moment the cooling cycle started. Ten seconds, twenty, and I was coming up on twelve thousand kilometers from my target. Close enough. I ripple-fired my whole magazine of anti-ship missiles, and slewed my vessel through a ninety degree turn with the drive still at max thrust. Even with that sideways acceleration I’d pass within eight thousand kilometers of the cruiser, but their point defense weapons would have more urgent targets than me.

  Most of my missiles carried thirty megaton Casaba howitzer warheads, capable of generating a superheated jet of plasma that would damage a ship from up to two thousand kilometers away. The strike cruiser’s flanks boasted four hundred centimeters of armor, more than enough to protect against them. But they’d saturate the ship’s deflectors momentarily, and burn off any sensors or point defense weapons near the impact points. That would create blind spots that the next wave of attack drones could take advantage of.

  But the real threat was the three missiles whose warheads were designed to act like a single-stage Orion drive, launching a shotgun spread of
antimatter pellets towards the target. Each of those was following a group of the conventional missiles in, ready to launch its payload in the brief interval when the bolts of plasma from the Casaba howitzers would hide the projectiles from enemy sensors.

  A few dozen of those fifty-gram antimatter pellets hitting the hull at six thousand kps would do real damage even to a strike cruiser. If I was lucky enough to catch it with the cooling ports open I might even cripple the main gun, which would be a heck of an accomplishment for a tiny little attack boat.

  I watched the missiles dodge and weave their way towards the target. One was vaporized by a secondary battery, and then the cloud of ionized coolant dissipated and the ship’s point defense lasers opened fire. But I could see I’d timed it right. Just a few more seconds until my missiles reached effective range. One blew up, and then another, their protective bubbles of plasma boiled away by an increasing number of lasers. But there were fourteen left. The lead missile was about to fire…

  The sim froze, and I realized my com was buzzing.

  “Hello?” I said, momentarily disoriented by the sudden transition.

  “Alice?” Lina’s face popped up on the com channel, looking concerned. “Where are you? Aren’t you supposed to be joining me for rounds this morning?”

  “Morning?” I blinked slowly, and looked at the time.

  “Oh, crash! I’m sorry, Lina, I lost track of time. I’m on my way. Don’t let me slow you down, I’ll catch up. I’m really, really sorry!”

  She laughed. “Don’t worry so much, Alice. I’m not mad. Have you been up all night? What were you doing that was so interesting?”

  I shut down the sim, and started climbing out of the VR pod.

  “I was looking through the ship’s education database, and I found all these space battle sims,” I admitted. “Darn it, I knew this VR stuff was addictive.”

  “Ah, so that’s what does it for you? You know, usually when a girl gets so into her sims that she loses track of time, it’s a completely different kind of scenario…”

  “Lina! I’m officially fourteen, you nut. I’m way too young to be hearing about whatever freaky stuff spacers do with their sims.”

  “If you say so, Alice. I had you pegged as a vanilla girl anyway. You know, sunsets and poetry and long walks on sandy beaches.”

  “Oh. Well, that doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “See, I know what I’m talking about. Don’t be shy if you ever need advice. Trust me, I’m an expert on pretty much everything.”

  “Do I even want to know what ‘everything’ includes?”

  “I don’t know, do you?” She teased.

  “Not today,” I decided. “Ugh, that was stupid of me. I can’t believe I stayed up all night trying to learn how to blow up imaginary spaceships.”

  “Sounds better than learning on real ones,” she observed. “Well, drag your butt down to the mess hall so we can get some food in you. We’ve got a big day ahead of us. We arrive at Zanfeld tonight, and the captain wants a readiness check on all the ship’s weapons before we drop out of the Delta Layer.”

  “I’m on my way, Lina.”

  All the girls teased me about my little misadventure, but they also fed me so I couldn’t complain. I sheepishly promised to pay more attention to my clock from now on, and then Lina and Jenna dragged me off for their inspection of the ship’s magazines.

  Their contents were a bit of a surprise to me. Intellectually I’d known that the Square Deal must be decently well armed, but the giant rack of missiles still caught me off guard. Hundred-ton anti-ship missiles, not much different than the ones that the ships in that sim had been firing at each other.

  “Pretty sweet, huh?” Jenna said proudly. “This is the primary magazine for all twelve portside missile tubes. Each tube has a secondary magazine that holds eight missiles ready to launch, which is enough for most attack patterns. Those are actually the only missiles we keep hot, because it’s a pain to maintain them that way.

  “Where are the warheads?” I asked, because the missiles I was looking at clearly didn’t have payloads mounted. What kind of warhead would a civilian ship use, anyway? I couldn’t see chemical explosives doing much to a pirate ship, but the missiles had a lot of delta vee. Maybe some kind of kinetic kill vehicle? Well, no, that wouldn’t work. If there was one thing I’d learned in the last few hours, it was the power of point defense lasers. Getting a payload within a few thousand kloms of a target was hard enough. Physically touching it would be pretty much impossible.

  Lina led me to another hatch. “The warhead magazine is through here. Our missiles all use the same payload couplings, so we can mix-and-match whatever warheads the missile gunner calls for. Those bots over there fetch warheads and attach them to missiles when we’re expecting trouble. You can see we’ve got the good stuff, too.”

  I found myself staring at the neatly engraved labels on the stacked warheads. Casaba howitzer rounds. Nuclear shotgun systems. Six gigaton planetary bombardment warheads. Bomb-pumped laser arrays. Crash, this was the same kind of loadout a Dominion warship would carry.

  Lina giggled at my expression. “You look so cute with your mouth hanging open like that. Why are you so surprised?”

  “Lina, this is awesome! But how do we get away with it?”

  “What do you mean, Alice?”

  “I mean, we could flatten a planet with this much firepower. Isn’t it illegal or something?”

  “Ah, you’re still thinking like a dirtsider. Alice, who would pass a law like that, and how could they enforce it? Every ship that ventures off the major space lanes needs to be armed for self-defense, and you can’t drive off a pirate with the piddling little beam weapons a cargo ship has room for. You need nukes, and lots of them, or you’re an easy target.

  “Besides, even if the major colonies tried to regulate spacecraft weapons, how would they enforce the ban? There are a million dark colonies willing to sell us the radioactives they mine, and we can fab our own warheads.”

  “A real navy still has a lot more firepower than any merchant ship,” I pointed out.

  “True, but the important thing is we aren’t helpless. A customs cutter can’t just order us to cut our drive and submit to boarding on a whim, because we can easily fight them off long enough to jump out of the system. We’d have to avoid that colony in the future, of course, but there are thousands of colonies just in this sector. So any colony that tries to regulate spacers too heavily will just drive off all the merchants in the area, and end up having to build their own trading ships.”

  “Which would have to be armed just like the independents,” I realized. “Is that why the Merchant Association has so much power?”

  “Partly. They also have the backing of the major insurance companies, and a pretty shrewd governing board. The Association is good at minimizing conflict between spacers and the colonies, which gives them a lot of influence on both sides.”

  “I see. Still, I never realized space was so chaotic. It feels weird that there’s no one in charge of things.”

  “Would you prefer the Inner Sphere? The Sol Sector is so heavily colonized there’s no dark space left, and major powers like the Dominion or the Polytechnic Swarm hold tens of thousands of systems each. They can enforce whatever regulations they like within their territories, and their border controls are good enough that they’ve just about eliminated piracy.”

  “Yeah, and they’re all tyrannies,” I grumbled.

  “Exactly. Freedom is messy, and often dangerous. But the only alternative is tyranny. Now, let’s get these inspections done. We need to spot check two of each warhead and missile type, just to make sure the automatic diagnostics are still working right. Then we can do a test run on the missile fabricator, and whip up another batch of laser heads so Chief West will stop complaining about our readiness state.”

  I wasn’t sure I agreed with Lina, but I set aside the political philosophy to concentrate on engineering. It was pretty neat to get a look at the insi
de of half a dozen different kinds of nuclear warhead. Just thinking about the amount of sheer firepower I was looking at made me feel funny. Kind of warm and giddy, and it was a little hard to sit still. I found myself hoping I’d get a chance to see everything in action someday.

  I’m sure Lina noticed, but she didn’t comment until we’d worked our way through most of the inventory. Then she paused in the middle of stripping down an anti-missile.

  “You know, Alice, we need to get you a gun.”

  “A gun?” I squeaked. My mouth was dry.

  “That’s right, a gun. Zanfeld is a pretty rough place. A cute little thing like you can’t go wandering around unarmed, and sticking with hidden weapons is practically entrapment. You need to advertise that you’re not a victim, or you’ll never get through a night of clubbing without a fight. You are coming to Greymore’s with us, right?”

  “Greymore’s?” I repeated.

  She grinned. “It’s a spacer bar. The captain has a lease on one of the private suites there, but he likes to have some backup around while he does his business. So the girls and I always dress up and hit the dance floor for the evening. We’re going to drag Naoko along and make her have some fun, so you should come too. We’ll teach you how to flirt with the guys, and you can protect us if anything happens.”

  Me, protect the foxgirls? Wow. I was amazed at the feelings that welled up inside me at the suggestion. For a moment I really wished they were my foxgirls. Mine to protect, and lead, and hold…

  I pushed the images away. The techs weren’t mine, and they never would be, and since when did I want to own people anyway?

  But they were my friends, and it would be perfectly natural to look out for them. Besides, it sounded like fun. Only, there was one problem.

  “I don’t know how to dance,” I admitted.

  “We’ll teach you,” she assured me. “If you even need the help. You’ve got some kind of photographic reflexes thing going on, don’t you? I bet you can just watch someone dance, and then copy everything they did perfectly.”