Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1)

by E. William Brown

  “Pretty much. But isn’t there supposed to be more to it than just copying a set of motions? I’m not sure about that part.”

  “If you can fight, you can dance. We’ll teach you. But first, we need to fab you a gun. What do you think, laser or mass driver? I bet you’re a mass driver kind of girl. Something nice and beefy, with a million ammo options and enough kick to make a mule jealous.”

  “Mass drivers run out of ammo,” I objected, though I was practically drooling at the thought. “But I guess lasers would too, since I can’t afford a nuke pack. Um, are grenades allowed? Or maybe a mini-missile launcher?”

  She laughed. “This is Zanfeld, girl. You can carry anything you want, as long as there’s no antimatter involved. Don’t forget about your outfit, though. I’ve got some nice bodysuit designs you could borrow if you’ve got your heart set on a gunbunny look, but you’d be adorable in a good dress.”

  The rest of the work day flew by in a blur. Lina had a million suggestions, and each one made me that much more impatient to get to a fabber and try them out. I’d never been on a night out before, and now I was going to visit a fancy spacer club with a whole group of friends. This was going to be great!

  Chapter 10

  My hopes of striding into the club looking like a tough, no-nonsense spacer woman were dashed by the mirror. Not to mention the way Kara and Mina kept bursting into uncontrollable giggles when they saw me.

  “Sorry, sweetie,” Kara said. “Black leather really doesn’t work for you.”

  “Give it up,” Mina advised me. “Seriously, there’s no way you’re going to look tough with that face. Besides, why would you want to? If you look tough people will hassle you just to see if you really are. You should try to look cute instead. That will be a lot easier, and then everyone will go out of their way to be nice to you.”

  I huffed. “I’m just tired of everyone thinking I’m prey.”

  “So be an ambush predator,” Mina said.

  I blinked. Huh. That didn’t sound so bad, actually.

  “Between the gun and the dragons, no one with a brain is going to make too many assumptions,” Kara said. “Cosmetic work is cheap, and there are people a hundred years old who make themselves look like little kids. The thing is you need to work with your looks, instead of fighting them. If you try to dress like a drop marine it makes you look like a little girl trying really hard to act tough, and if you have to work at it that usually means it’s all fake. What you need to do is wear a cute dress, maybe put some ribbons in your hair and have one of the dragons sit on your shoulder, and pick out a weapon that looks like a fashion accessory. Then people will see a consistent look, and assume you’re the type who likes to be underestimated.”

  I frowned. “If everyone is going to assume that, doesn’t it mean it wouldn’t work?”

  Kara grinned. “Nope. They’ll think to themselves that they shouldn’t underestimate you, and then do it anyway. If you look young and cute the men will be extra nice to you, the women will try to mother you, and they’ll all let you get away with murder. They can’t help themselves.”

  “She exaggerates a little,” Mina warned me. “But only a little. A lot of human social responses are hard-wired, and most people can’t just override them. Now come on, let us give you some suggestions.”

  “Okay. I guess I should leave this to the experts,” I sighed.

  Once I stopped fighting the inevitable it was actually a lot of fun. Kara was really good at fashion, and her collection of clothing designs was huge. She got a little carried away sometimes, but Mina was good at bringing her back to reality.

  Some of her efforts made me look like a confection, and others were just too weird. Or sexy. Apparently being nearly naked was fashionable on a lot of colonies, but I really wasn’t ready to show that much skin. What we finally settled on was more conservative, but I liked the effect.

  It was a layered outfit, starting with an airy white dress with ruffled sleeves and a skirt that didn’t quite reach my knees. Over that was a dark blue outer layer that covered my torso but left my arms bare, with a split skirt that reached my calves on the sides but basically didn’t have a front or back. The edges of that were picked out in a complicated pattern of gold embroidery, which matched the gold necklace and earrings that came with it. The shoes were simple open-toed flats, and a pair of fingerless blue gloves completed the outfit. The gun we picked out was a slim blue and white mass driver, in a holster that attached to the dress at the small of my back. After a moment’s consideration Kara added four gold bracelets on each wrist.

  “I like it,” I admitted, looking at my reflection in the full-length mirror. “It’s not armor, and the gun is kind of dinky, but it’s pretty.”

  “Oh, I think we can satisfy you on the practical side of things too,” Mina said knowingly. “The quick-fab version is just for trying things on, you know. Kara, what are the specs on the smart matter version?”

  “The underdress is only a millimeter of light duty armor,” Kara admitted. “But the overdress is another three millimeters, and the ensemble can morph into a full coverage bodysuit in thirty seconds. There’s a deflector grid woven into the overdress along with proximity radar, good enough to stop shrapnel and low-velocity debris. The gun is a custom case wrapped around a Nova Arms 6mm mass driver core, with a peak muzzle velocity of eight hundred meters per second. I recommend standard guided dual-purpose rounds for tonight, but you can load it with anything from nanobots to Californium rounds.”

  “Californium rounds? Why would you make a bullet out of some rare artificial isotope?”

  “Technically they don’t,” Mina informed me. “It’s just one of those literary terms that got used as a product name, and then turned into a standard nickname. The idea is you make a hollow bullet out of a highly radioactive isotope with a very low critical mass, and fill the space in the middle with a compressible neutron moderator. When you fire it the bullet hits the target’s armor and collapses, squirting all the filling out openings in the sides as it crunches up, until you get a solid lump that’s just over critical mass. Then it goes boom.”

  A nuclear pistol round? “Seriously? That sounds awesome! What’s the yield?”

  “You can get up to thirty tons or so with the right isotopes,” Kara said. “But they’re really expensive. The isotopes have to be synthesized with a particle accelerator, and they decay so fast you have to re-fab the bullets every few days.”

  “They’re also radioactive enough to be a health hazard for normal humans, and a lot of places ban them,” Mina said. “It’s a cool idea, but it usually isn’t worth it. I definitely don’t recommend it for tonight. If you need AoE just use your grenades.”

  “Grenades?” I looked myself over with a frown. “Where?”

  “The bracelets,” Kara said. “The real ones are self-propelled grenades, with a decent guidance package and a hundred grams of hyperexplosive filler. Just don’t go firing them off on the dance floor, even if we do have trouble. If you injure a bystander the wergild comes out of your pay.”

  “I know, I know. Naoko made me do a whole class on the Association code after Hoshida. If the inugami come for Naoko again I’ll be careful.”

  Mina snickered. “At least you’re learning. But hey, don’t get all paranoid and forget to enjoy yourself. Zanfeld is a Rom colony, and those guys really hate yakuza. No one is going to try anything here. The worst you have to worry about is getting caught up in a bar fight, and you’d probably enjoy that.”

  “That’s right,” Kara said. “So relax, and have fun. Hey, maybe you can even catch yourself a cute guy or two.”

  “I think our tiny terror is more into girls,” Mina mused.

  I rolled my eyes. “You guys are terrible.”

  Thankfully, their teasing was interrupted by the shudder of the Square Deal dropping out of the Delta Layer. That always seemed to be a rough transition, and both foxgirls had to stop and lean against the nearest bulkhead for a moment while their se
nsors recalibrated.

  “Ugh,” I complained. “That’s so annoying. Are you two alright?”

  Mina shrugged. “Yeah, it’s just worse for us because we’re hooked into the ship’s stress monitors. People don’t think about it, but even with diamondoid structural materials a Delta transition is pretty close to the limits of what a ship can take. The dimensional shear forces are pretty intense, especially on older ships like the Square Deal. It feels like we’re going to have to rebuild the bulkhead between holds eleven and twelve again, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah, the self-repair system isn’t keeping up,” Kara agreed. “I keep saying we need to move The Beast closer to the ship’s centerline, but the first mate never wants to hear it.”

  “The Beast?” I asked.

  The foxgirls gave me matching grins.

  “It’s a secret,” Mina said.

  “Maybe we’ll show you sometime, if you’re good,” Kara told me. “But right now we’ve got a night on the town to get ready for. Let’s get your things fabbed up before the passengers start to think about disembarking, and Naoko gets swamped again.”

  The next few hours were pretty busy, but I managed to keep an eye on the exterior feed as we made our way into the system. According to the atlas I’d looked at Zanfeld was just outside Federation space, and I was curious what it would look like.

  I quickly discovered that it was completely different than either Felicity or Hoshida. Zanfeld was a Mars-type planet orbiting a dim red dwarf star, and the colony seemed to be on the surface. But with a mere hundred thousand people in the system it barely even looked like a colony. There weren’t any stations, and the port was basically just a commercial district for visiting spacers.

  Where did the people live?

  There was a lot of air traffic on Zanfeld, and eventually I realized that there were underground complexes dug out all over the region around the port. There were also a lot more ships than I would have expected from such a small colony. A couple of refinery ships operating fleets of ramscoop shuttles, harvesting the atmosphere of the system’s gas giant to make fuel and light feedstocks. Mining operations on several of the gas giant’s moons, and small cargo ships carrying their production to factory ships in Zanfeld orbit. More ships that I mistook for passenger liners at first, until I realized they were in long-term parking orbits. An orbital shipyard that looked suspiciously like it was designed to be broken down and loaded into cargo ships. A whole squadron of system patrol boats, of a design that looked seriously out of date even to my amateur eyes.

  The datanet said Zanfeld was ‘colonized’ twenty years ago, but this looked more like some kind of temporary camp than a permanent settlement.

  “Like I said, it’s a gypsy colony,” Mina said when I asked about it. “That’s their thing. They like to set up gray ports around the edges of established clusters, where people on both sides of the law can meet to do business. When the local powers get tired of it and try to clean things up they just move someplace else.”

  “Most of their ships don’t look like they could make it into the Delta Layer,” I said dubiously. “Wouldn’t they be easy to catch? They’d need weeks to get anywhere in the Gamma Layer.”

  “It’s not like they’re going to form up in a convoy and do a least-time course to their new site,” Mina said, sounding amused. “If they’re worried about pursuit they’ll scatter in all directions, and they won’t all stay in the Gamma Layer either. Some of them will hide out in nearby systems, either in the Alpha Layer or normal space. Some of them will spend a week or two hiding out in subspace before they poke their noses out, or just go dark out in interstellar space. Sometimes they’ll fab up decoy squadrons to throw off pursuit, or find a friendly colony where they can blend in until the heat dies down. Can you imagine the Federation Navy putting in the kind of work it would take to hunt them down?”

  “I guess not,” I admitted. Everyone knew that the Federation Navy started out as a pirate fleet that decided it would be easier to run a protection racket than to actually chase down merchant ships. They’d grown into something resembling a government over the last fifty years, but they still weren’t interested in doing more work than they had to.

  “I bet a Bastion would, though,” I pointed out. The Bastions had come out of the Clone Jihads with quite a reputation for military efficiency, and they had a low tolerance for criminals.

  “Which is why you won’t find a Rom colony within twenty light years of a Mormon outpost,” Mina said. “They’ve gotten very good at avoiding interstellar powers that would actually be a threat to them. But the Bastions are strung out along the spinward edge of the sector, so that’s not a big problem anyway. Now, enough about that. Want to watch the landing?”

  “Landing? You mean the whole ship?”

  Kara chuckled. “Yep. People are always surprised a ship this size can land, and it does burn a lot of fuel. But it’s a lot more convenient than staying in orbit, and for a colony that doesn’t have a station it usually works out to be cheaper than messing with shuttles.”

  The bridge was off-limits to a junior probationary crewmember like me, but there was an observation post in engineering that was just as good. The walls, floor and ceiling were all one giant display screen showing the view in all directions, while a holotank in the middle of the room showed a tactical schematic of our surroundings. Kara was off duty, so she let me in and watched with me as we made our descent.

  Zanfeld didn’t have much of an atmosphere, so we came in steep with the Square Deal’s armored bow facing the port. Just like a combat drop. Well, I guess if this was a combat drop the locals would be shooting at us, and we’d have a screen of escort drones out. But still, it was fun to imagine. Those dinky little system patrol boats didn’t have the firepower to stop a ship this big, and I wasn’t seeing any ground defenses. Some of the other ships in port had enough weapons to be a threat, but most of them were on the ground. Pay off the pirates in that converted frigate, drop a bombardment on the port as we descend to soften them up, and then offload troops. If the ship’s holds were full of marines instead of cargo we could take this place. Rooting out those underground habs would be a pain, but once we controlled the surface it would just be a matter of time.

  A sudden jolt startled me out of my thoughts. What? We’d reconfigured the ship’s deflector shield into an air brake? But we were still at twenty thousand meters. Slowing down now would just give the defenders more time to organize before we got boots on the ground.

  Oh. Right. Not an invasion.

  Why did I feel a twinge of disappointment at that? I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I really didn’t. It’s just, the idea of storming a target, catching the defenders napping and making them pay for the mistake, crushing all these tough guys into the dirt and making them acknowledge my superiority…

  Mom, what kind of messed up antisocial instincts did you give me?

  “Exciting, isn’t it?” Kara said. “I love it when Beatrice turns down the inertial compensators, so you can really feel the maneuvers. You can tell she’s going for a bounce and drop landing, too. Traffic control would have a heart attack if we did that at a real colony, but the Rom don’t care.”

  “Bounce and drop?” I asked. Come to think of it, we were still coming in kind of fast. The atmospheric braking wasn’t going to be near enough, and the Square Deal didn’t have a lot of braking rockets facing forward. I knew it was designed for combat drops, where you have to come in as fast as possible and brake at the last moment, so how was that supposed to work?

  I remembered how the Speedy Exit had lifted off, and my eyes went wide. “Wait, you don’t mean…?”

  “That’s right,” Kara grinned. “Beatrice is a combat ace, and she always does things the fun way when the captain lets her. So hold onto your hat, because this ride’s going to get bumpy!”

  The ship’s bow abruptly rose, leaving her descending belly-first towards the spaceport a scant few kilometers below. Dozens of braking thrusters roared
to life, sending long lances of superheated plasma spearing out ahead of us. Forty gravities of deceleration, enough to dump half of our velocity in a few seconds. But that was, what, four or five kilotons per second of energy output? If the jets touched the ground they’d wreck the landing field, and the backblast would probably damage the ship.

  Instead the jets throttled down as we descended, and cut out entirely while we were still nearly a kilometer up. The ship’s momentum exchange system went to full power as we plummeted towards our assigned landing pad, forming a huge lift field beneath the ship.

  We fell for a second. Two. Then the lift field made solid contact with the ground, and our descent slowed abruptly. The field generators strained under the load, channeling the enormous momentum of the ship’s descent into the planet beneath us. For a few milliseconds I wasn’t sure there was enough field strength to handle the impact. But the Square Deal’s descent reversed itself a good hundred meters from the landing field, leaving her bouncing gently in midair.

  The landing gear deployed, and the ship settled gently to the ground.

  “That was awesome! I’ve got to learn how to do that,” I said.

  “It is, isn’t it? Beatrice is kind of grumpy, but I’m sure we’ve got piloting classes in the library.”

  “No, piloting is easy. I’m talking about the momentum exchange system. I’ve got to learn how those things work. There’s so much awesome stuff you can do with them.”

  “Well, yeah, they’re pretty much the heart of modern spacefaring tech. Thrusters, deflectors, fusion reactors, mass drivers, artificial gravity and inertial compensators - it’s all based on the momentum exchange effect. I guess things would be pretty primitive without it. But you aren’t seriously telling me it’s the engineering that has you all excited?”

  “The ride was a lot of fun,” I admitted. “I bet the passengers are freaking out.”

  “Oh, we leave the inertial compensators turned all the way up in the passenger cabins,” she said dismissively. “We don’t give them an outside feed, either, so they’ve got no idea what they just missed.”