Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1)

by E. William Brown

  On day seven Chief West finally stopped with the weird tricks, and instead set me up as a platoon leader in a station defense. That was a huge scenario compared to anything we’d done before. The battlefield was a massive colony station, thirty kilometers in diameter with a defensive layer two kloms deep. At the start of the scenario a lot of that had already been destroyed by the bombardment and initial landings, but my sector was still ten times the volume of the Square Deal.

  As the first wave of enemy troops encountered my perimeter minefield I thought over what I knew about station assaults. This kind of battle is always a meat grinder. The enemy would expect to lose millions of bots, and a lot of people too. But they were doing this because they wanted to capture the station instead of destroying it, so they wouldn’t throw too many nukes around. Mostly it would be overwhelming numbers of bots, with as few humans in the mix as they could get away with.

  Hmm. Bots are stupid, and they have trouble coping with the unexpected.

  I kept one focus of attention on the battle, but pulled my command group back towards the interior of the station. There was a damage control room full of friendly techs who weren’t doing anything right now. I commandeered some of the fabricators, and started a set of builds going.

  It takes hours to fabricate a proper warbot, but small objects are faster. Like, say, those utility fog weapons Chief West had used on me yesterday. They looked like normal smoke, until they landed on a target and blinded its sensors. Back them up with a few dozen little bird-sized suicide bots full of hyperacid…

  It worked like a charm. I took out a whole platoon of enemy bots without a single casualty, and pushed them back long enough to lay down a fresh minefield. On impulse I grabbed the enemy wrecks too, so we could break them down into feedstock.

  That was the start of the longest battle I’d ever fought. The sim was running at four times normal speed, stretching my six hours of afternoon training into a full day of nonstop combat. I abused the damage control facility relentlessly, fabbing one weird threat after another to confuse the enemy. I had access to the same libraries the chief did now, and I hit him with a lot of the stuff he’d been using on me. One platoon after another of enemy bots fell, and my own forces were actually growing.

  But the rest of the perimeter was retreating, and the enemy was endless. I was forced to fall back when the front shifted enough that I was in danger of being cut off, and again when a full battalion assaulted my position.

  By then I was starting to suspect this was one of those no-win scenarios, but I had to be doing pretty well. I pressed on, making the enemy pay for every inch of ground they took. The next time I found myself in danger of getting cut off I was ready, and used my ‘exposed’ location to launch an attack deep into the rear of the enemies on my right flank. I bagged an enemy commander in that fight, and if my allies hadn’t been a bunch of dumb simulations we probably could have launched a counteroffensive while they were off balance.

  Instead I ended up being forced back again. Step by painful step I retreated, as the hours dragged by. But I didn’t let them keep me completely on the defensive. I launched counterattacks, and left assassins behind when I had to pull back. I faked my own death, and then crushed the enemy when they tried to exploit their ‘victory’. I killed a second enemy commander, and a third, and then my assassins got a fourth.

  Finally, after a full day of nonstop combat, the scenario timed out.

  I sagged in relief, and looked around at the frozen scene. “Whew. Now that was a fight. The after-action is going to take all night, though.”

  “No analysis on this one, kid,” Chief West said, his avatar materializing next to me. “That was your final exam. Congratulations, you pass.”

  “I did? We’re done?”

  “For now,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll be back for another cert at some point, right? But for now you can pat yourself on the back, and take it easy for a few days.”

  My file pinged me with an update. Alice long, Certified Warbot Commander. Wait, what kind of score was ‘100% +Ir’?

  I tried to look that one up, but the certification rules just said that commendation stars can be awarded for achievements ‘beyond the normal scope of an exam’. The awards ran from bronze through silver, gold and platinum, with iridium at the top. So it had to be something good, right?

  “A perfect iridium?” I gasped. “What does that even mean?”

  “It means you’re one of those supersoldiers who blow the curve for normal people. You know, all you have to do to pass that test is hold out for four hours without losing more than half your platoon. The test AI called it because you ran out the clock, but it’s smart enough to figure out your force was getting stronger instead of weaker. So, perfect score for ending the scenario with a full platoon, and an iridium star to show you’re good enough that normal test scenarios can’t find your limits.”

  I was speechless.

  He mussed my hair. “Go hug Emla, and give the techs a call. I’m sure they’ll want to throw a party or something. Stop by my office the day after tomorrow, and we’ll get you set up with a squad of your own.”

  He was right. I had to tell Emla, and the foxgirls. Somehow, I kept my squeal of delight bottled up until after I’d logged out of the sim.

  Chapter 19

  The mood on the ship was tense as we approached Taragi, the hidden colony where the leader of the Masu-kai yakuza organization lived. It wasn’t the sort of place where even the Square Deal would normally go. The blackest of black ports, hidden deep in the officially uninhabited reaches of the Bali Gap, more than thirty light years from the nearest publicly known colony.

  With a small yellow star and a motley collection of small rocky and icy planets, the system didn’t look like much at first glance. There wasn’t even a gas giant, or an asteroid belt to support mining operations. It was a bad place to build any kind of industry, which would normally make it a poor place to colonize.

  But the yakuza weren’t running a normal colony. Their money came from their customers, who congregated here seeking goods that even the corrupt governments of the Federation or the Corporate States would never tolerate. There were slavers here who dealt in authentic humans, and brainwashing experts willing to train them to order. There were black market vendors who sold everything from pocket antimatter bombs to mass mind control systems. There were a thousand purveyors of exotic vices offering experiences the human mind was never designed to handle, each more addictive than the last.

  A normal black port might have pirates and smugglers rubbing shoulders with assassins and back alley body modders. Taragi was where the pirates and assassins went to learn their trade. If you wanted to build a horrible custom bioweapon to unleash on your enemies, or come up with an inventive new vice that would lure millions of customers into hopeless addiction, Taragi was where you went shopping.

  It was also a water planet. A warm ocean nearly two hundred kilometers deep covered the whole planet, and below that was another fifteen hundred kilometers of water compacted into exotic forms of ice by the pressure. In the early days the yakuza colony had been a giant submarine that could dive beneath the waves if a naval vessel from some civilized world came poking around. Hiding activity in space is hard, but a bottomless ocean provided pretty good cover.

  They’d long since left that covert existence behind, of course. These days Taragi’s location was an open secret among the criminal elements of the Kerak sector. But it was remote enough that no major power had ever felt motivated to clean the place up, and the defenses were more than a match for anything a minor colony might send there.

  The system didn’t have a battle station in the Gamma Layer, but there was a network of sensor platforms keeping an eye on traffic. The Beta and Alpha layers had similar setups, and once we dropped into normal space the defenses became evident. In addition to swarms of heavily armed customers there was a whole squadron of frigates patrolling the system, and three small but dangerous-looking battle st
ations orbiting the planet.

  “There’s probably a lot more we can’t see,” Mina pointed out as we made our approach. I’d joined her and Lina in the observation room down in engineering again, so I could get a look at the place.

  “Yeah, an atmosphere and a few hundred meters of water make for pretty good protection, at least against lasers and mass drivers,” Lina agreed. “They’ve got drone bases and missile platforms hidden in the ocean, where they can surface to launch attacks and then submerge again to hide from return fire. You’d need some kind of special weapons to attack the place.”

  “Nuclear depth charges, maybe?” Mina suggested. “I read about a war like that once. Anyway, the worst part is no one knows how much stuff they’ve got down there. Armored military bases could easily descend to fifteen or twenty kilometers, which means there’s no easy way to spot them from orbit.”

  “So basically, if they decide to attack us we’re in trouble,” I said. “Our only chance is to run the moment we see the defense bases start to surface, and get far enough away to jump out before their missiles can catch up with us.”

  “Which is why they have those battle stations in high orbit,” Mina pointed out. “They might look puny compared to the ones in a major system, but they still outmass us by a factor of twenty. We have to park inside their orbit before the Masu-kai will let us send a shuttle down, and at that range the heavy mass drivers they carry will wreck us in just a couple of salvoes. We’ll be too close to the planet to make a hyperspace transition, and we’d never survive long enough to get out of its gravity well.”

  Yeah, we weren’t going to be fighting our way out of this place. Better not get anyone mad at us, then.

  “I don’t even want to think about how dangerous it must be to wander around this place,” I said. “We’re staying on the ship while the captain meets with this yakuza boss, right?”

  “We certainly are,” Mina assured me. “Pirate ports aren’t too bad if you can handle yourself, but the Masu-kai are different. They’ve got this whole thing about acting cultured and stuff in public, but if one of them decides to kidnap you off the street for some recreational torture there’s nothing you can do about it. Trying to defend yourself just makes them mad.”

  “Unless you’re from the Azure Star,” Lina added.

  “Who?”

  Mina grinned, and pointed out one of the ships parked in orbit. Unlike all the other visitors this one was orbiting outside the ring of fortifications. I pulled up a closer view of it, and gasped.

  “Gaia’s breath, Mina, that’s a cruiser!”

  A small one, relatively speaking, but it was still five and a half kilometers long. It looked like some kind of heavy commerce raider, with enough firepower to smash normal escort ships and enough speed to run away from heavier battle fleet elements. A huge relativistic mass driver in a spinal mount gave it the punch to take out smaller battle stations, and the eight heavy grasers mounted in turrets along the top and bottom of the ship would make short work of frigates or destroyers. Hundreds of smaller mass drivers protected against being swarmed by fast attack boats or other small ships, and it must have had thousands of point defense lasers. I didn’t even want to think about how many millions of tons of missiles and attack drones a ship that size could carry.

  “Mina, what’s a raiding cruiser doing hanging out at a yakuza colony?”

  “They’re pirates,” Lina said.

  “The most famous pirates in the sector,” Mina added. “You should really read up on the pirate clans, Alice. It’s important to know these things.”

  “There’s no way some pirate got rich enough to buy a ship like that,” I protested. “It’s bigger than all three defense stations and the frigate squadron put together.”

  “It’s from the Inner Sphere,” Mina explained. “The original crew are all survivors of some minor nation that got wiped out by the Polytechnic Swarm. Their leader, Captain Kolbe, started out trying to get together some kind of revenge alliance. But that was ten years ago. He had to go pirate to get the resources to keep his ship running, and I guess somewhere along the way he decided to just give up the fight and enjoy life.”

  I stared at the display. “Their whole country is gone? That’s terrible. But what kind of target would a ship that big go after? It must cost a fortune to keep it running.”

  “They hire themselves out as privateers sometimes, when there’s a major war,” Lina said. “When things are peaceful they find other targets. Tankers carrying bulk feedstock shipments. Minor colonies that annoy them. I hear they do asteroid mining sometimes, too. They’ve got thousands of civilians on board, and I guess they turned some of the hangers into fabricator bays.”

  Yeah, a ship that size could house a whole colony. It probably had, what, half a billion cubic meters of hangar space? They wouldn’t want to use mass drone tactics anyway if they were trying to turn a profit, so they could afford to convert some of it. They could easily have tens of thousands of people living and working there.

  “Well, I can see why the yakuza wouldn’t try to push them around too much,” I said. “They could wreck this place pretty badly if they wanted to. Take out the stations and defense squadron, and drop a few thousand depth charges with multi-gigaton warheads into the ocean. They’d take damage doing it, and I’m sure there’d be survivors, but it wouldn’t be fun.”

  “Too bad we don’t have that kind of firepower on call,” Mina said.

  “We’ll just have to keep to ourselves, and trust the captain,” Lina added. “He’s been doing this forever, though. I bet there won’t be any problems.”

  “Really? I didn’t think the Square Deal was that old.”

  “This isn’t his first ship, Alice. From the stories I’ve heard, I think he’s been a ship captain for more than a century.”

  Wow. That was a long time.

  “He’s got some amazing stories about the early days of colonization in the Kerak sector,” Mina added. “He was around when the Mormons founded the first Bastion of Faith. One of the original Victoria colonies came out on his ship. So don’t worry. He’ll get us through this.”

  “I guess so,” I said. I couldn’t even imagine how many problems someone that old must have weathered. This whole yakuza thing was probably just another routine hassle to him. No wonder he always seemed so patient.

  A new appointment appeared on my personal calendar, and I frowned.

  “The captain wants me to come to a meeting? Uh, oh. I have a bad feeling about this.”

  I arrived at the briefing room to find Captain Sokol, Chief West and Naoko all waiting for me. Great. I nodded to the captain, who was deep in conversation with Chief West, and slid into an empty seat with a grimace.

  “So much for hiding on the ship until everything is settled,” I grumbled to Naoko.

  “Why, what do you mean, Alice?” She replied.

  The captain turned from his discussion. “I’m afraid she’s right, Naoko. This is going to be our away party.”

  “What? But Captain, surely you don’t mean to take an innocent young girl into a place like this.”

  “I’m afraid I must, Naoko. For several reasons.”

  “I was there for the thing with the inugami,” I said. “They might want to hear about it first hand, and it will go over better if the story isn’t coming from an android. If they don’t take it well they might want to punish me for interfering, but if I’m right there they can just get it over with instead of sitting around getting madder while they wait for me to come down from the ship. I’m also hidden backup. If there’s any backstabbing they’ll probably focus on Chief West, and underestimate me.”

  “A succinct summary of the situation,” Captain Sokol agreed.

  “But Captain, she’s only a girl,” Naoko protested.

  “Sadly, the galaxy we live in has little regard for such niceties,” he replied. “Alice, I don’t believe you’ll be in any great danger from the oyabun. You didn’t cause the inugami any harm in your litt
le scuffle, and in any event he has a bit of a soft spot for young girls. But we’re going to be surrounded by some very rough characters, and my influence may not be enough to protect you from everyone. Are you up for this?”

  I frowned. “What would you do if I said no, sir? Don’t I need to be there?”

  “We could always claim that you jumped ship at Yinpang, Alice. The Square Deal is a large vessel, and it would not be excessively difficult to hide you.”

  Yeah, I could imagine. The techs hadn’t actually shown me any secret smuggling holds yet, but Lina had bragged about them.

  “Thank you, sir, but you don’t need to do that. I’m ready to pull my weight. If you think it will help for me to go down with you, I’ll do it.”

  “I wish you could at least make a backup first,” Naoko fretted. “I feel terribly selfish, leaving a copy of myself on the ship’s computer while you and the captain risk your lives.”

  “Actually, dear, I do have a backup,” the captain told her. “But don’t spread that around. If people realize that you’re wired for uploading you lose half the advantages. Alice, I don’t suppose that your fathomless library of enhancements includes such a feature?”

  “I don’t think so, sir,” I answered slowly, as I considered what my instincts were telling me. “At least, not to standard hardware. Software backups are too big a security risk. Anyone who has access to the data could use it to make extra copies of you, and even edit their memories or personality. Mom was too paranoid to trust anyone that much. I think I’m going to have a, um, what? A hardware backup option? How does that… oh gosh, that’s so embarrassing! Um, anyway, it doesn’t matter. I can’t do it yet. My, um… the fabricator it uses isn’t fully developed.”