Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1)

by E. William Brown

  “My mistress is shy,” she told them. “Usually it’s just us, but I’ll let you know if she wants something different while we’re here. Sound good, Alice?”

  “Um, yeah,” I managed. “What she said.”

  Emla started laughing the moment they left the room.

  “Now they’re going to think we’re sleeping together!” I complained.

  “We are,” she pointed out.

  “No, I mean, that we’re doing it! Oh, you know what I mean. Ugh! Are you trying to embarrass me?”

  “Maybe a little,” she admitted. “But hey, I figured it was better than the alternative,” she said. “Do you really want to explain to them why you don’t want anyone? That would be an embarrassing conversation, but if you don’t tell the whole story they might feel insulted. Or worse, their boss might decide they’re not doing a good enough job and replace them. This way they’ll come to me with stuff like that, and I can run interference for you.”

  I sighed. “I guess you have a point.”

  “Of course, if you want to find out what all the fuss is about you couldn’t pick a better place. I’m sure they could find you some handsome, smooth-talking guy with years of intensive training in how to please a lady…”

  I threw a pillow at her.

  The bed was strange, built low to the ground with a thinner mattress than I was used to. But the silk sheets were really nice, and I had to admit that having Emla next to me made me feel a lot better about sleeping in a strange place.

  The next morning I indulged myself by sleeping in, and having breakfast in bed. But I was used to having a million things to work on, and by noon I was starting to feel a little stir-crazy. Captain Sokol spent the morning on the com, and then went out with Naoko and Chief West to have a bunch of meetings with people. But I didn’t have any work to do, and I couldn’t access the ship’s training libraries from here. There was a collection of vidshows in the suite’s datanet, but they were all ‘cultured’ stuff that seemed stupid to me. The books weren’t any better, and sitting around talking about nothing was going to get old fast.

  “Is there a training room we can use?” I finally asked.

  “Of course,” Azalea assured me. “What sort of training?”

  “You know, martial arts? Emla just got a new body recently, and we haven’t had a chance to try it out properly.”

  “This sounds like fun,” Emla put in. “Are you going to teach me that neat style you use, Alice?”

  Style? Since when did I have a style?

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  “The dojo is, of course, open to guests of the oyabun,” Azalea said. “Shall I reserve a space for you?”

  “Sure. Where is this place?”

  It turned out that the palace had a whole big facility devoted to fighting practice, with lower levels that the inugami used and an upper level reserved for important people. Which apparently included guests, because that’s where Emla and I ended up. It was pretty empty in the middle of the day, with just a handful of men in funny clothes practicing with wooden swords over in one corner. We claimed a stretch of mat on the other side of the room, where the ceiling was high enough to allow for aerobatic maneuvers.

  Some instinct had led me to reject the special exercise clothes Azalea offered. Instead Emla wore her skinsuit, and I was back in the dress I’d worn for the audience. I switched it to combat mode as I squared off with Emla, and the skirt instantly divided into strips that wouldn’t get my way. I’d left the shoes behind, of course. I wasn’t about to try fighting in high heels.

  “Alright, let’s see what you’ve got,” I told her. “No lethal weapons or AoE effects; we’ll pretend we’re trying to capture each other intact. Ready? Begin.”

  She was fast. I’d barely finished the word when her fist tried to cave in my face, and as strong as she was I knew blocking was hopeless. Instead I shifted slightly to one side, grabbed her wrist and elbow, and used her own momentum to throw her.

  A human would have been stunned by the impact, but she rolled back to her feet before my follow-up kick could land. Our manipulator fields clashed, negating each other as we traded a series of fierce blows that mostly failed to connect.

  She was a lot better than I’d expected. I could tell she didn’t have the instinctive awareness of motion that my physics sense gave me, but Strange Loop Sleuth had set her up with an elaborate set of skill packs that almost made up for it. She was also a good twenty times stronger than me, and she had lots of sneaky tricks built into her. She could change the length of her limbs at will, and deploy cutting edges in all kinds of inconvenient places. She had nonlethal weapons, too. Contact drugs and neurostims, on top of the sonic stunner that our rules excluded.

  At first she chased me all over the mat, but I adapted pretty quick. In a few minutes I was holding my own, and then I got her measure and really started to make her work for her hits. I think I learned more about unarmed fighting in the next hour than I had in my whole life.

  It was like dancing, only better. A furious chess match where the slightest hesitation meant instant defeat. The fact that Emla’s body was so much tougher than mine only made it more fun. She seemed invincible, and maybe she would be to bare hands. But I had my own advantages. My field was stronger than hers, and far more precise. I was getting a feel for how her body worked, and that gave me ideas about how to beat this challenge.

  The first time she managed to pin me she grinned down at me for a second, and kissed me on the tip of my nose.

  “Got you, Alice.”

  Then she bounced to her feet, and stepped back so we could start again.

  I blushed, and didn’t say anything about it. But when I finally figured out how to use my field to pull her components out of whack so I could pin her for a second, I found myself returning the favor.

  She looked so adorably confused. She was strong enough to pick up a tank, but with her elbows locked in a half-transformed state she couldn’t move her arms to throw me off.

  “What… how… what did you do?”

  “Got you, Emla.”

  I kissed her nose, and released my grip on her internal parts as I stepped back. The little bits of diamondoid bone slotted back into place, and her joints suddenly started working again. Her eyes went wide as she finally realized what I’d done.

  “Alice! You keep your field off my parts, you cheaty super-mistress you!”

  “Make me,” I shot back,

  After that things really heated up, and we traded dirty tricks for a while. Her neurostims could make my muscles lock up if her hands got within a few cems of me, or else tickle me mercilessly. I could coat my skin in a film of frictionless superfluid oil, and still make any part of it cling to anything I wanted with a nearly unbreakable grip. We could both use our fields in concert with our muscles, or as a shield against each other’s blows.

  Finally we broke apart, breathing heavily, and I realized we had an audience. Most of the older men had stopped their training to watch us, along with one new arrival.

  “Very impressive, Miss Long,” Akio said. “Although your choice of training attire is a bit unconventional.”

  Suddenly I was very glad that my dress was expensive smart matter, and not some cheap fiber blend like the shifts I’d worn at the orphanage. By this point a shift would have been soaked through with sweat, clinging to me and probably half transparent. But my dress was as clean and dry as if it had just come out of the fabber. With its active cooling feature running full blast I wasn’t sweating much either, and somehow it even kept me from getting all smelly.

  “Practice as you mean to fight,” I said simply. “An enemy isn’t going to wait for me to change into a gi before they attack me.”

  “Well said,” he replied, although I noticed that he was wearing a traditional gi just like everyone else. “Your retainer’s mastery of the Furious Angel techniques is impressive, but your own style is more difficult to place.”

  “You’re guess is as good as mine
, my lord,” I admitted. “It’s innate, and so far no one has been able to figure out where I came from.”

  “Please, call me Akio. Will you indulge my curiosity with a match?”

  He held a pair of sheathed swords in one hand. Long blades that the datanet identified as a modern variation on the ancient katana style, although these didn’t have real edges. Practice weapons, then. But a more serious sort that the wooden things I’d seen the other men playing with before.

  “I’d be happy to, Akio. And please, call me Alice. But I have to admit, I’ve never even held a sword before.”

  “Then this will be a learning experience for us both.”

  He tossed me one sheathed weapon. Emla stepped back, giving us room, and I hefted it thoughtfully. Feeling out how it would move. What the weight would to do my balance. How to strike, and defend. Billions of possibilities flashed through my mind’s eye, most of them discarded as soon as they appeared. But others coalesced into chains of movement. Clusters of probability that were worth my full attention, and vast regions that weren’t. I could do this.

  “Blades only?” I asked, stepping back and copying the pose he’d assumed. Wait, no, he was taller than me, and a lot heavier with all those muscles and internal armor layers. I adjusted my feet slightly, and flexed my knees a little more. Perfect.

  “Unarmed strikes and grapples are allowed, but no hidden weapons or other tricks,” he amended. “Any blow that would disable an unenhanced human counts for a point. An advantage of three points decides a match. Those are the standard Masu-kai dueling rules.”

  I nodded, noting the way he’d adjusted his own stance slightly. I realized he’d been ready to take it easy on me before, but after seeing me read his stance he’d decided to take me seriously instead.

  Why did that feel so good? Was I that worried about what some lowlife crime boss thought of me? Well, he was a pretty yummy crime boss. But this would be a terrible time to get distracted, so I told myself to pay no attention to the way his muscles flexed when he moved.

  Okay, maybe a little attention. One thread. Two, tops. I was good at multitasking.

  “Ready? Begin!”

  I exploded into movement, crossing the distance between us in a single leap. My blade flashed out in a clean arc that combined the draw with a disemboweling blow, but he must have been expecting something like that. He smoothly slid left out of my blade’s arc the instant my feet left the floor, and tried to take my head off while I couldn’t dodge. I parried with the scabbard, a neat trick I almost hadn’t thought of, and the impact sending me flying halfway across the mat.

  Good thing, because I needed the extra milliseconds that gave me to prepare for his next attack.

  He was good. Really, really good. Even faster than Emla, and at least twice as strong. I couldn’t block or parry in the normal sense at all. It was all dodging, or else putting my sword where the impact of his next blow would help move me where I wanted to be. But what really made this hard was the incredible skill he displayed.

  I could see every possible way either of us could move at any given moment, and pick an effective counter to anything he did. But trying to look three or four steps ahead to outsmart him didn’t work. The sheer number of options we both had made it impossible to check every possible way an exchange could play out, and he didn’t just blindly pick the ‘optimum’ move like a bot would.

  Instead he did complicated feints and misdirections, trying to lure me out of position for a surprise attack. He threw in intentionally pointless flourishes to distract me, only sometimes they had a hidden purpose that I barely caught in time. He’d spent huge amounts of time and computing power exploring the space of possible fights that we were dancing through, and he took every opportunity to lure me into regions of the possibility space that put me at a disadvantage.

  It still took nearly two minutes before he managed to slide his blade around mine at just the right angle to send it flying from my hand. The follow-up punch would have crushed my throat if he hadn’t pulled it at the last second.

  I twirled around the blow, brushing past him within easy grappling distance so I could reach out and snag the spinning shape of my sword with my manipulator field. He reversed his sword and tried to stab me in the back, but my smaller size made me nimble enough to evade the attack. I got behind him, sword in hand, and then we were both hurriedly spinning and backpedaling.

  He glanced at the sword. “How did you do that?”

  “Manipulator field,” I grinned. “That’s allowed as long as I’m not boosting myself or hitting you with it, right?”

  “I see you’ve been reading our dueling rules. But fine manipulation at three and a half meters, with an emitter that can’t be more than six cems across? There are no enhancement projects in the Kerak Sector capable of matching that.”

  We circled each other slowly, feeling for an opening.

  “Yeah, I’m pretty awesome,” I admitted. “It’s actually a full-body emitter network, though. I can stop small arms fire for a few seconds, before my power cell runs dry.”

  “Do you need to stop and recharge?”

  I blinked, and barely had time to realize he was teasing me before I had to frantically evade another attack.

  I was learning, though. His second touch took three minutes, and then I managed to hit him back. We broke apart again, and I realized I was panting. I was pushing myself to the limit, and it felt amazing.

  “You aren’t simply copying my style,” Akio observed.

  “Of course not. That would be stupid. You obviously know it better than anyone, so you’d just use it to beat me. Besides, I’m not strong enough to fight the way you do. I have to do more of a float and sting approach.”

  “Yes, that lack of power seems to be your weakness.”

  I shrugged. “It will come. Give it a year, and I’ll be ready to juggle tanks just like you.”

  “That’s good to hear. But you’ll have to be careful until then, or you could all too easily be overwhelmed.”

  I was going to ask what he meant, but he was already demonstrating. When you don’t have a slow organic brain bogging you down, strength turns into speed incredibly easily. This time he came in twice as fast as he had before, and there was nothing I could do to stop him. I could see exactly where he was going to strike, but no matter how I strained my aching muscles I couldn’t move fast enough to do anything about it.

  The tip of his sword poked me hard in chest, perfectly angled to slide between my ribs and into my heart. He deflected my counterattack effortlessly, and then he had my wrist in his hand and his sword at my throat.

  “Match,” he said.

  “You win,” I agreed.

  Maybe I should have been upset at that, but I wasn’t. My heart was pounding. Discord, but that was amazing!

  Was he going to kiss me?

  He let me go, and sheathed his sword. “An excellent match, Alice. I’d suggest another, but you look like you need a break.”

  “Yeah, my metabolic warnings are all screaming at me. I’d better sit down and get a recharge before I pass out. Thanks for the match, Akio. I learned a lot.”

  “Join me for breakfast, tomorrow,” he said. “Perhaps we can both learn a bit more.”

  Without waiting for an answer, he turned to greet an older man who’d been watching the fight. An instructor, I guess, but I was too stunned to pay much attention to their conversation.

  That’s one dangerously sexy guy, Emla commed to me.

  Oh, yeah, I agreed.

  Are you going to go?

  Oh, yeah.

  She giggled. You do remember he’s evil, right?

  Hey, let me have my illusions here. You never know. Maybe he’ll turn out to be the one honorable man in this snake pit.

  If only. But it wasn’t like I could refuse. What do you wear to a private breakfast with a yakuza heir, anyway?

  Chapter 22

  By the time I got back to my rooms a formal invitation had arrived, and the ma
ids were all atwitter about it. According to them Akio didn’t have visitors like that very often, and the venue was something special.

  “A business meeting might be held at lunch, or over tea,” Azalea explained. “While a lover might be invited to dinner, with the expectation of staying the night. Breakfast is intimate without that extra implication.”

  “It’s like being declared family,” Iris exclaimed.

  “If it were in his own quarters, yes,” Azalea conceded. “But the invitation is for the Hungry Garden.”

  Iris and Freesia both paled.

  “I take it that’s bad?” I asked.

  “Merely dangerous, my lady,” Azalea said. “The Hungry Garden is filled entirely with beautiful but predatory life forms. They’ve been carefully engineered not to attack members of the Himura clan, but any outsider would be dead before they could take two steps.”

  Freesia nodded, and clasped her hands earnestly beneath her chin. “Please be careful, my lady. The servants there are part of the garden, and they’ll turn on you in a moment if you lose your scent badge. Everything in that place is full of the most horrible biothreats you can imagine. Poisons, nanoplagues, parasitic spores, hyperacids - they say even soldiers in powered armor wouldn’t survive the garden’s wrath for long. Lord Himura likes to hold meetings there when he’s displeased with people, and when he wants to make an example of someone he makes them hand in their badge.”

  “Freesia used to be with the garden liaison team,” Lily said. “She knows what it’s like.”

  “I guess they don’t let guards carry heavy weapons there?” Emla asked.

  “I’m afraid guards are not allowed in at all,” Azalea corrected. “You may escort her as far as the entrance to the garden, but then you’ll have to wait there with the young lord’s escort. As for the lady, traditional dress is expected.”

  “Well, that sucks,” Emla huffed. “Why the heck would he make her go someplace like that? Is this some kind of threat?”

  “Not at all. As I said, this is a rare and intimate venue. To meet with Lord Akio alone, for breakfast, in a place of subtle beauty and power… I can only guess that he intends to make you an offer, my lady.”