Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1)

by E. William Brown

  How many warbots did Chief West have? Hopefully a lot more than I’d seen so far.

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

  “I’m fine. What about Mr. Desh, though? Is he making these bots? Why would he do this right when we’re being attacked?”

  “He must be working with the pirates, Alice,” she pointed out.

  I checked the exterior view again. Somehow we already had four interceptor drones roaring towards the incoming missiles, blazing away with their lasers and mass drivers. That was a relief, but there were still an awful lot of missiles on the way.

  “Pirates? Wouldn’t pirates be trying to capture the ship? These guys are trying to kill us, Naoko. If they blow up the ship he’ll die too.”

  “He may well be under someone’s control, Alice. Now please, try not to worry too much. Our protectors are quite capable, and I believe they were prepared for this ambush. Just stay away from the fighting, and help the techs if you can.”

  “I could help with the bots, Naoko,” I suggested.

  “Absolutely not, Alice. You don’t even have proper armor! Stay away from them, and let Chief West do his job.”

  Part of me really wanted to argue. I hated having people think of me as a helpless little civilian who needed to be protected. But she was my superior right now, and somehow the idea of disobeying orders in the middle of a fight felt even worse.

  “Aye aye, ma’am. I’m stopping by my cabin to get my gun and the dragons just in case, but I’ll stay away from the fighting.”

  I stopped running, and grabbed a handhold next to a sealed hatch. Most of the missiles were gone now, but the thirty that remained were just about at attack range. I turned most of my attention to the exterior view, hoping I was deep enough in the ship to be safe.

  The missiles dodged frantically, their plasma barriers and armor ablating away rapidly under the fire of our point defense lasers. Our fire was quickly getting more accurate as they closed in, and light speed delay was no longer enough to throw off the aim of our targeting computers. But fourteen thousand kilometers was getting into viable range for laser warheads. A missile died, and then another. Why weren’t they attacking? Twelve thousand kilometers, and only twenty-six missiles were left. Ten thousand kilometers. Eight. What were they doing?

  At a measly six thousand kilometers the last eleven missiles finally detonated, and I discovered they were shotgun warheads. Instead of producing plasma jets or beams of x-rays, each ten-megaton nuclear warhead propelled a spray of solid slugs toward the Square Deal. A fog of metal particles and hot gases accompanied them, hiding most of them from our sensors momentarily.

  Six thousand kilometers away, and the slugs were coming in at seventy-three hundred kilometers per second. The debris clouds thinned out quickly as they expanded, and it wasn’t long before our fire control started picking the projectiles out of the haze. But that left a mere seven hundred milliseconds for the point defense lasers to work, and there were thousands of them flying towards us. Eighty lasers that could fire in the right direction, twelve milliseconds to vaporize each slug and two more to orient on the next target - it wasn’t enough.

  Thousands of slugs made it through the point defense fire, sailed through the thin gas of our plasma barrier and crashed into the shield protecting the top of the ship. It slowed them down considerably, but they were still traveling at over four thousand kilometers per second when they struck the ship a moment later.

  This time the ship lurched violently under the flurry of impacts. Each slug blasted a huge crater in the Square Deal’s armor, and some of them penetrated into the machinery beneath. Red warning labels blossomed all across the damage control display, some of them two or three decks in from the hull.

  I took a few more milliseconds to assess the damage. Thirty point defense lasers were out of action, as well as two missile launchers. Three more shield emitters and several clusters of attitude jets were knocked out. Deflector strength was down twenty percent, and one hit had penetrated the starboard shuttle bay.

  Bad, but I bet the enemy was expecting a lot worse. A civilian ship would have been gutted by that strike, but the Square Deal was a tough old lady. These guys were about to have a really bad day.

  As if to confirm my thoughts, a salvo of two hundred missiles suddenly erupted from our remaining launchers. A swarm of attack drones launched at the same time, ejecting from ready racks fore and aft of the main shuttle hangars. Then the big 10cm mass drivers fired, sending a shudder through the ship as they hurled cluster rounds at the enemy attack drones.

  We were still in this fight. Time for me to do my part. I let go of the handhold, and sprinted for my cabin.

  Chapter 14

  I’d barely finished strapping on my pistol when I got my next call.

  “Mistress Alice? The security bots at the fabricator bay say I’m not authorized to go in. What should I do?”

  I sighed. Of course they wouldn’t let Emla in there. She wasn’t part of the crew, and with intruders on board I was lucky security hadn’t assumed she was hostile.

  “I’m on my way, Emla,” I told her. “Tell the bots there’s a crew member coming to resolve the situation, and do whatever they tell you until I get there. Alright?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’ll just wait right here.”

  Ash jumped to my shoulder as I turned to my cabin door, and Smoke darted out into the corridor ahead of me. They were in full bodyguard mode, sweeping their suspicious gazes over every nook and cranny of the empty hall looking for waiting assassins. Normally I would have dismissed their behavior as silly, but right now I was glad of the extra eyes. I had better senses than they did, but if I got distracted they’d still be keeping watch.

  As I sprinted for the aft fabricator bay I reflected that space battles seemed to involve a lot more running than I would have expected. Good thing I was the athletic type, or these hundred-meter dashes would be a real problem.

  I commed Mina. “Reporting for duty, ma’am. What can I do?”

  “Alice? Oh, did Naoko send you to help out?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m almost to the aft fabricator bay.”

  “Why the heck would you go there? Parts fabrication is all automated on the Square Deal, you know that.”

  “Ah, because Naoko told me to go there? I assumed she must know something I didn’t.”

  Mina gave an aggravated growl. “Ugh, that woman! No, she’s just being overprotective. The fabricator bays are about as deep inside the ship as you can get. The bridge and engineering control are probably the only safer places to be right now.”

  Naoko was just trying to get me out of the way? Now I was mad.

  “I see. Well, I’m not a helpless little civilian who needs to go hide somewhere, ma’am. How can I help?”

  She chuckled. “Do you have any idea how weird it is to hear a human call me that? This isn’t a military ship, Alice, so just call me Mina. Here, I’m giving you access to the damage control workspace. Chief Benson is keeping the repair queue prioritized, and the AI should be decent at filtering out the jobs you’re not rated for. But we don’t use that feature much, so don’t be shy about skipping things you’re not sure you can do.”

  I followed the link she’d sent me, and found myself looking at a much more detailed display of the ship’s status. There was a lot of information about repairs needed, work in progress, parts fabrication and delivery status, all kinds of stuff. I had no idea damage control was so complicated. But the work queue was easy enough to find. I logged in, and looked over the list of jobs the engineering AI suggested for me.

  “Alright, I’ll get started on this,” I confirmed.

  “Great. Don’t be afraid to requisition repair bots to help you. That’s what they’re for, and the requisition queue is prioritized so you’re not going to accidentally slow someone else down. Oh, and is that your little minion at the fabricator station?”

  “Emla? Sort of. She’s a rescued slave Dusty was smuggling to some Underground
Railroad colony. I had her helping me with some work when the alarms went off, and she offered to help out.”

  “Well, unless you’re going to claim her you’ll have to keep her with you until this is over. She’s probably for real, but we can’t have any unidentified people wandering around when we’ve already got infiltrators on the ship. She’ll end up getting shot for sure.”

  “Understood. Sorry, Mina, I should have thought of that.”

  “It’s alright, Alice.”

  “Mina? How can you be so calm?”

  The ship lurched as the big mass drivers fired another volley.

  “What, are you worried? We’ll be fine, Alice. Trust me, we’ve been in much worse scrapes than this one. Just don’t go near the fusion reactors, and make sure any repairs within twenty meters of the hull are done by remote control. Got it?”

  “Got it!”

  “Good girl. See you at the victory party.”

  She closed the connection just as I arrived at the fabricator bay. The big hatch was open, and a team of labor bots were carefully levitating a big emitter module through. A pair of humanoid security bots stood just inside the room, with their capture foam guns trained on Emla. The mouse girl was standing stock still with her hands in the air, but she seemed more amused than worried.

  “Hello, Miss Long,” one of the bots said. “Can you confirm this android’s identity?”

  I actually checked her ID code, just to be safe.

  “Yes, this is Emla. She’s with me.”

  “She is not listed with the ship’s crew, Miss Long. Unauthorized passengers are defined as stowaways, and must be secured pending an interview with the captain.”

  This was getting really frustrating. “Mina said she’d be fine as long as she’s with me.”

  “Senior Tech Mina is not authorized to clear stowaways for shipboard activity. I’m afraid I have to lock her up unless you can provide an alternative, Miss Long.”

  I frowned up at the armored bot. “You’re awfully smart for a security bot. Why are you looking for a reason not to put her in the brig?”

  “Chief West only buys the best, Miss Long. I’m concerned because the brig is too close to the hull to be safe in the current situation, and preserving civilian lives is one of my secondary directives.”

  “Please don’t lock me in a room that’s going to get blown up,” Emla pleaded, suddenly concerned. “I’m sorry, Mistress Alice. I thought I could be useful but I’m only causing trouble. Maybe you should just deactivate me?”

  “That would work,” the bot agreed.

  An unfamiliar vibration went through the deck. I glanced back at the damage control display, and had to suppress the urge to swear. Chief West’s warbots were in the middle of a firefight with those infiltrators just four decks down, and some of the things were bomb bots. There were other groups of them spreading out across the lower decks, too. Trying to avoid our warbots, and do whatever damage they could to the systems they could reach.

  “I’m not going to leave you helpless in a corner somewhere with all this going on,” I told Emla. “Look, you said you wanted to imprint on me. That doesn’t have to be permanent, right?”

  She gasped. “Yes, please! You’re right, Alice, it doesn’t have to be permanent. You could sell me or give me up later if I’m not useful to you. But I’ll warn you, you’re the best mistress I could ever dream of. I’m sure I’ll do my very best to convince you to keep me.”

  Why did it make me feel so funny to hear that?

  I pushed the confused ball of emotions away, and checked the ship’s regulations. Yes, this would work. I gave Emla a firm nod.

  “Do it. I claim you, Emla.”

  She sent me an odd data packet full of complicated encryption, but something in the back of my head knew exactly what to do with it. I sent back the response that felt right, and she replied with another one. For a few moments we exchanged a flurry of data, a delicate dance of artfully crafted security features designed to prove that I was a real human and she actually had the imprinting mechanisms that she said she did. The math was beautiful, and the sudden insight into the deepest layers of Emla’s mind was one of the most intimate things I’d ever felt.

  Her core algorithms were an elegant structure of fierce protectiveness, not that different from my dragons. But the clean lines were marred by a ham-fisted patchwork of inferior code, crudely warping her natural personality. Most of that was immutable, frozen when she was compiled into hardware. But there was one gap I could patch.

  Emla gasped.

  “Mistress! What did you do? I feel… I’m not… you changed my code! I thought that was impossible?”

  “It is,” I agreed. “I just took advantage of a feature you already had. I think it’s supposed to let your owner slot a custom goal generator into that gap in your mind, so they can make you behave however they want. But I just stuck in a com hook that will call me when you don’t know what to do, so I can run ideas past your evaluation functions until we find a goal you like.”

  She stared at me.

  “Just like that? That sounds really distracting, Alice. How did you even know to do that?”

  I shrugged. “You sent me your code during the imprinting, silly. Did you think I wouldn’t read it? Now come on, we’ve got work to do.”

  I turned to the security bot. “Does that solve the problem?”

  It pinged her IFF, and nodded. “Yes, Miss Long. Emla is now registered as your personal property, so you may assign her whatever duties you wish. Be advised that you’re responsible for her behavior, and that the captain does not permit abuse of companion androids aboard the Square Deal.”

  “Good. Alright, let’s see what needs doing.”

  Emla trailed along after me as I entered the fabrication bay. “But, but, I don’t understand. My code comes to sixteen gigabytes, Alice. How could you understand all that in a split second?”

  “If I figure that out I’ll let you know, Emla. In the meantime, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t draw attention to me when I do something that ought to be impossible.”

  “Oh! Of course. I’m sorry, I was just confused. Um, what are we doing?”

  “Simple repair work,” I told her. I sent her a link to the damage control system, and showed her how to find the work queue. “Most of this is work I’m not qualified for yet, but I think we can handle some of the simple stuff. Maybe those armor patching jobs?”

  Emla cocked her head. “I’ve never done that before, but it sounds like something even a bot could do. Why isn’t that fully automated?”

  “From what my lessons said, bots would just cut away all the wreckage around each hole and try to replace everything perfectly to spec. A good engineer can recognize when something can be jury-rigged for now, and when you can skip replacing individual components. Like, a bent pipe will still work if you just bend it back, and the ship has plenty of spare computing nodes so we don’t need to bother replacing damaged ones right now.”

  “I see. Yes, I can figure out that sort of thing.”

  A com call from Lina interrupted my reply.

  “Alice! You have no idea how glad I am to see you on the call roster. I need your help down here.”

  The crew locator showed Lina was in the engineering space over the vehicle bays, dangerously close to the nearest group of rampaging bots.

  “Lina? What are you doing down there?”

  “I’m trying to cut the power to this asshole’s fabricators, so he can’t make any more of these damned bots. But I can’t get to the breakers for the bay he’s in, and if I cut power further upstream it’ll take down a bank of point defense lasers. The bots know I’m here now, but I think I can draw them off. Can you sneak down behind them and get the breaker while I’m keeping them busy?”

  “You can’t just shut it off remotely?”

  She huffed. “Would you want to serve on a ship where one guy in engineering can turn off everything at the push of a button? No, essential stuff like power all requi
res physical access. Can you help me out here?”

  Now this was an assignment I could get into. I plotted a course through the ship’s maintenance tubes, and checked the cameras to make sure my route was clear. There were a lot of bots in the area, but it looked doable.

  “No problem, Lina. I’ll have that power line shut off in five minutes, tops.”

  “Thanks, Alice. I owe you one.”

  I turned to Emla, and relayed the change of plans while I started a priority build on one of the small fabricators. She shook her head.

  “Battles sure are confusing,” she commented. “I’d guard your back, but this body isn’t combat rated.”

  “I know. I’ve got another job for you. I’m fabbing some extra gear here, just in case things don’t go as smooth as I’d like. I don’t trust a delivery drone to get to me with all these boarders running around, so when the build finishes I need you to bring it to me. The gun is for you, just in case, but obviously I want you to stay out of fights if you can.”

  She checked my build order. “Ammo and cool battle toys? Yes, Mistress! I’ll get it all to you in one piece, just as soon as it’s ready.”

  “Good girl. See you soon.”

  The engineering spaces didn’t have gravity, so I made good time bouncing down the long, empty service tubes. I had to slow down once I got close to the fighting, though, so I could keep an eye on all the cameras around me. Unfortunately the Square Deal’s security cameras didn’t have complete coverage, so I had to pay close attention to make sure I didn’t stumble into a bot that was standing in a blind spot.

  Most of the bots were busy fighting Chief West’s defense squads, and not doing very well against them. I guess real warbots are a lot more dangerous that civilian models with guns, which kind of makes sense. But there were little groups of enemy bots trying to sneak around the fighting. One group looked like it was headed for Fusion Three, but there was a squad en route to cut them off from reaching the reactor. Another was shooting up a fuel tank, letting the liquid methane inside flood out into one of the cargo bays. That was going to be a mess to clean up.