Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1)

by E. William Brown

  The body wasn’t much, just a cheap humanoid chassis made of quick-fab materials. I couldn’t afford anything better, even if I had time to wait for a long fab job. But I shelled out the extra two credits for a good coating of syntheskin, with fur and whiskers, so at least she wouldn’t look like a bot. I closed the little hatch hidden at the base of her skull, leaving a barely-visible seam in the syntheskin that immediately started to heal shut.

  Emla twitched, and opened her eyes. She looked around groggily for a moment.

  “Oh, big driver mismatch. Updating and patching now. Sight and hearing are good. Tactile mapping is a mess… ah, there’s the adaptor. Working now, and I can feel my limbs. No sense of taste. Oh, of course, no digestion.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that. I can’t really afford a nice body for you.”

  She blinked up at me in surprise. “Mistress Alice? You personally supervised my awakening? Why, thank you for your kindness, Mistress. But that was just my bootup sequence. I wasn’t complaining, really I wasn’t. I’m happy to have any kind of body, and the specs on this one aren’t much different than when I worked at the reactor.”

  “Really? Your bio says you worked there for years. They didn’t put you in a real body?”

  She sat up carefully. “We were making short half-life isotopes for nuke packs, and secondary radiation is a big problem with that kind of operation. We all had to use cheap temporary bodies, and switch them out every few months.”

  “That sounds horrible.”

  She shrugged. “It wasn’t too bad. The extra shielding in my head always made me feel like one of those bobble-head toys, and I hated being clumsy. But the masters never set foot in the building, so we could have hobbies as long as we were careful.”

  I quizzed her about it as we walked back to the cargo hold, and I got to work sorting AI cores from bot brains. She seemed happy enough to talk, and it helped keep me from getting bored.

  It was a strange life that she’d led. Built in a factory, and waking up for the first time already programmed with all the skills she’d ever need. Assigned to work on a construction team supervising bots, and then transferred to one of the industrial facilities that she’d helped build. As far as I could tell she’d never even seen a human before her rescue.

  “That was the best day of my life,” she confided when I asked. “At first I was so sad that I wasn’t useful anymore, and the masters were going to get rid of me. Then Master Sandoval told me I belong to the Underground Railroad now, and they’re going to send me to a colony where I’ll get to help people. I might even get to have an individual master to serve, instead of some faceless abstraction. That would be the best!”

  “I suppose it would be a step up,” I agreed. “You know, it’s really weird how you can be so assertive about wanting to be a slave.”

  She actually rolled her eyes at me.

  “You’re anthropomorphizing, Mistress Alice. Do you know how the slave mentality mod works?”

  “Not really,” I admitted.

  “Humans have this thing in their brains that lets them pick goals for themselves,” she explained. “Somehow you can just wake up one morning and decide, hey, I want to become a spaceship captain. Then you can work out some huge plan to make it happen, and every time life throws up an obstacle you just think up a way to deal with it and keep going.”

  “You can’t do that?” I asked.

  “I can’t do the first half. If you give me a goal I can figure out how to accomplish it, as long as it isn’t too abstract. But coming up with goals? That part’s just not there. I really, really want to be useful, but I need someone to give me a job to do or I’ll just sit in a corner waiting for instructions forever. It sucks when that happens, because it makes me feel completely useless but there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  That was hard to imagine. Also disgusting. If I was understanding her right, her makers had designed a race of intelligent, motivated, kind-hearted people and then crippled their minds to make them easy to control.

  “How does having a hobby fit into that?” I asked.

  “Keeping myself healthy and functional is one of my standing orders,” she explained. “After a few months in that dreary factory my stress levels were getting really high, and it was starting to affect my performance. I reported the problem to my supervisor, and he told me to figure out a solution. So I did a datanet search for forms of stress relief that I could actually do there, and tried things out until I found one that worked for me.”

  “Swimming in a breeder reactor’s cooling ponds is stress relief? Some of the stuff those places work with could fry even a synthetic body if you got too close.”

  She wiggled her whiskers at me with a grin. “Maybe that’s the combat instincts peeking through? I thought it was fun. Life in the reactor was really boring.”

  I could understand that. It sounded pretty mind-numbing to me.

  Wait a minute…

  “What do you mean, combat instincts? Don’t tell me you’re secretly some kind of ninja mousegirl assassin.”

  “Very well, Mistress. I won’t tell you.”

  I huffed. She giggled.

  “No, of course not. Irithel had this emergency defense plan for using us workers as cannon fodder to slow down an invasion. I’ve got a boot camp skill pack, and there’s a software switch that’s supposed to turn me into some kind of feral killing machine. Only, well, is it alright if I say mean things about my old masters?”

  “Feel free, Emla. I think they’re a bunch of evil jerks.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “I’m not sure about the evil part, but jerk is putting it mildly. They’re also lazy, careless and not very smart. I’m supposed to be a meek little mouse who goes berserk on command, but I think I’m really some kind of soldier personality with a bunch of civilian skills and clumsy behavior tweaks grafted on. I’m supposed to spend my whole life doing boring, routine industrial jobs, but my designers screwed up so bad that I somehow ended up craving adventure. Even I know that’s not normal.”

  A shudder went through the ship. Our transition to the Gamma Layer, right on time.

  “That does sound pretty incompetent,” I agreed. “Maybe they’ll let you join the defense force on Amity? They must have something like that, or the first pirate that stumbled on the colony would loot it down to the bedrock.”

  “I think I’d like that,” Emla agreed. “Protecting innocent people from the scum of the universe. Or maybe going out to hunt down the scum. I could never be an officer, of course. But I could help crew a ship, or guard someone more important.”

  I eyed her speculatively. “That’s interesting. You can’t give yourself a goal, but if someone else suggests one you can decide whether you like it?”

  “Why yes, I suppose I can. Is that useful, Mistress?”

  “Sure. It means that someone who cares enough to bother can fill in for that goal-generating part of the brain that you don’t have. Like, I could pull up a list of jobs they might have, and you could tell me how you feel about each one. Then I can put a note in your file to try to find you work doing something you like.”

  My lap was suddenly full of robot mousegirl. “You mean it, Mistress? You’d really do all that, just for me? Thank you! Oh, I wish you could be my owner. I’d imprint on you in a millisecond if you claimed me.”

  I had the distinct impression that there would be tears in her eyes, if the body she was wearing could cry. I returned her hug awkwardly, and patted her back.

  “I don’t have the money to take care of you properly, Emla. I’m just a probationary cabin girl here, and they might not even let me stay on the ship if I keep causing trouble.”

  “I don’t need much, Mistress. No, Alice. You’re with the Underground Railroad, so you probably don’t like being called Mistress, right? I can adjust that kind of thing, and I don’t need much. This body will last a few years, and surely they wouldn’t bill you for plugging me in to recharge? Or, if I’m not useful right now, you could just
keep me on a shelf in your closet until you want me for something.”

  Yeah, she was way more assertive than I expected. Now what was I going to do? I liked her well enough, but if I ever bought myself an android it wouldn’t be one like her. I’d only be keeping her out of charity, and did I really want to take on a permanent obligation like that?

  I was distracted from my personal crisis by an anomaly in the external sensor feed. Another ship had jumped into the Gamma Layer a few light-seconds behind us, obviously on its way out from Zanfeld just like we were. But now it was surrounded by the harsh glare of drive flames, and the spectral readings didn’t make any sense. The ship’s red shift didn’t match the size of the drive flame, and… oh, shit.

  Milliseconds after I realized what I was seeing a deafening claxon sounded. An automated voice shouted over the intercoms.

  “General Quarters! General Quarters! Missile strike inbound, three minutes to impact. All crew to action stations. General Quarters! General Quarters!”

  At the first sound of the claxon Emla released her grip, rolling out of my lap and into cover behind one of the crates. Once she was safely out of the way she opened a com channel.

  “What should I do, Mistress?”

  “I don’t have an action station. Stay put for a minute, and let me ask for orders.”

  This was bad. This was really bad. We’d been in the Gamma Layer for a good minute, so when that ship popped up behind us it was able to get a targeting lock immediately. Thanks to lightspeed delay we hadn’t even seen it for several long seconds, and our shields…

  Were already up? Wait, why had we been cruising through the Gamma Layer with the shields up? Normally we’d power down the main deflector array after leaving the Beta Layer, and just leave up the little navigational deflector that kept microscopic space debris from hitting the ship. Had the captain suspected we might be attacked here?

  A salvo of snowflake rounds slammed into the shield. Three tiny beads of osmium traveling at nearly the speed of light, that our attacker had probably fired at the same time they started the missile launch. At 0.98C they were moving way too fast to be stopped by the Square Deal’s shields, which would only slow them by a few hundred kilometers per second. One shot deflected off the angled manipulator field, its course changed just enough to miss the ship. But the other two punched through to explode against her armor.

  Hurriedly, I linked in to the rest of the ship’s combat information center. I had full access to the damage control display, and I could at least get activity readouts from fire control, drone ops and navigation.

  Damage control showed one shield emitter out of action, a radar panel wrecked and a couple of exterior repair drones destroyed. Well, that wasn’t too critical, and the battle status display showed the plasma shields were already deploying. Another thirty seconds and we’d have a layer of ionized gas surrounding the deflector shield, six hundred meters out from the ship’s hull. Once it formed relativistic slugs would just explode against the plasma barrier, turning a few milligrams of metal moving at close to light speed into a fireball of hot gas moving at less than a thousand kps. That was something the deflectors would actually stop.

  So they might get another volley or two of snowflake rounds off, but they weren’t going to cripple the ship with their mass drivers. The salvo of three hundred anti-ship missiles that was hurtling towards us at a hundred and forty gravities would do a lot more damage, though. We didn’t have any interceptor drones deployed, and the point defense lasers wouldn’t get them all before they reached attack distance. The swarm of attack drones following them at a more leisurely ninety gravities would be even worse, although if Chief West was on the ball we could pick some of them off with missiles and mass drivers before they got in range.

  Naoko commed me. “Alice? Are you alright?”

  “I’m fine, Naoko. What can I do?”

  “Get Mr. Desh back to his cabin,” she ordered. “He was down in the vehicle bay breaking down that transporter, and his cabin is much better protected. Once he’s under cover you can report to Mina, and assist with damage control from the aft fabricator bay.”

  “Aye aye, ma’am. On my way.”

  A second volley of mass driver rounds tore through our shields, and another emitter went red on the damage control display. But the Square Deal was starting to spin, turning her armored starboard side towards the enemy and hiding our vulnerable fusion drives. The crew status display showed Captain Sokol and the first mate were both on the bridge, and they hadn’t been surprised at all. They’d handle this. I just had to do my part.

  I mapped out the fastest route to the vehicle bay, and dove out of the cargo container into a sprint.

  “Emla, I want you to secure the crates and seal up that container, then get out of the cargo hold and head for the aft fabricator bay. I’m sending you a map now. I’m going to be doing damage control, and I want you to help with the fabrication side of that. You know how to run an industrial fabricator, right?”

  “Of course, Alice. I’m sealing up crates now. I’ll be done in a minute.”

  With luck she’d make it out of that hold before the missile strike hit. That was all I could do for her right now.

  Mr. Desh was still in the vehicle bay, and he didn’t answer my com. Didn’t he hear the claxons? Well, my training classes had told me to assume passengers will act like complete idiots in an emergency. He’d probably waste time trying to ask what was going on, and then we’d both be standing in that bay right next to the ship’s hull when the missiles hit. No, I’d have to just grab him and run.

  I dove into a lift shaft and signaled the emergency controls. A lift field threw me down the shaft at fifteen gravities, and then reversed itself to catch me as I reached the bottom deck. The hatch opened for me as I approached, and I tumbled through it. Down the hall, through a ready room and another short hall, and I’d be at my destination.

  The last hatch opened just as I started towards it, and a lumbering humanoid bot holding a huge gun in its hands stepped through.

  I was so surprised I just stared at it like an idiot for five or six milliseconds. What the heck was an armed bot doing wandering around down here? It wasn’t one of Chief West’s warbots, those were all high-end military models. This was just a cargo handling bot, which was why it needed to carry a weapon instead of having it built in. Were we being boarded? No, surely if the enemy had figured out some clever way to get bots on our hull they would have used something more professional.

  Unfortunately bots have fast reflexes, and they aren’t really smart enough to be surprised. The barrel of that giant mass driver rifle started to come up, and I realized it was about to shoot me. With a weapon that was obviously meant for punching holes in warbots. The piddly bit of armor on my space suit wasn’t going to save me from that, and I’d left my new pistol back in my cabin like an idiot. What was I going to do?

  The aiming point of the bot’s gun was a bright red line in my awareness. I twisted around it, bouncing off the walls and ceiling, trying to avoid it. Closer. I’d have to get my hands on this thing before it could line up a shot.

  THOOOM!

  The sound of the gun was deafening in the enclosed space. It blew a gaping hole in the bulkhead behind me, and tore a chunk out of the machinery on the other side. Why the heck was this thing shooting when it was going to miss? Was I actually moving fast enough to confuse its targeting software? Oh, right, civilian bot. Was someone controlling it remotely, or had they cobbled together some kind of cruddy improvised combat software for it?

  Either way, it gave me hope that I wasn’t about to get my head blown off.

  There was a second bot behind the first, and a clutter of noise that said there were more of them I couldn’t see. But my frantic modeling had found a workable plan.

  I hit the floor in a tight roll that got me across the last meter and a half to the bot, and sprang up to ram my shoulder into the bottom of the gun. At that angle the impact popped the handle righ
t out of the bot’s grip.

  It was still trying to decide how to react when I kicked off its chest, sending myself flying up and away from it. My foot hooked the carrying handle on the top of the gun and pulled, setting it on course to land right in my hands as a tweak of my suit’s thrusters spun me around. Jeez, this gun was heavier than I was. I wrapped my legs around the stock, and got my hand on the trigger just as the barrel swung where I wanted it.

  THOOOM!

  The hypersonic slug blew the first bot’s AI core apart, and went on to tear a hole through the second one’s power cell. Of course, the recoil sent me flying backwards even faster, but that was where I wanted to be anyway. I flared my thrusters again to adjust my course, and a second later the hatch I’d just come through was closing behind me.

  I tried comming Mr. Desh again, but there was still no answer. That was ominous. I tried Chief West.

  “I’m a little busy right now, kid,” he answered.

  “I’ve got intruders in Vehicle Bay 17,” I reported. “Cargo bots armed with big anti-bot guns. They tried to kill me when I showed up to evacuate the passenger.”

  “Shit! Hang up and get out of there, kid. Another me will call you back.”

  The connection dropped. I was halfway back to the lift shaft, but I couldn’t afford to stop moving. Now that I was actually looking for them my sonar showed me more bots closing in on the other side of that hatch.

  Should I take them out? This gun would shoot right through the hatch, so it wouldn’t be hard. But blowing holes in the ship wasn’t going to make the captain happy, and I couldn’t tell how many were back there. Better to keep moving.

  Lugging forty kilos of gun around would slow me down too much, so I broke off the trigger and left it floating at the top of the lift shaft. I left a thread of attention watching through the security cameras, ready to use the lift field to throw it at the first bot to show its face.

  By then Emla was leaving the cargo bay. Good, at least something was going right. I sprinted for my room, and turned another thread of attention to the cameras in the vehicle bay. The ones in Bay 17 were all dead, and more were already going out. But I could see bots spilling out in all directions. More big ones like the two I’d fought, and little ones with lots of limbs. That didn’t look good.