Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1)

by E. William Brown

  Compared to that the various missiles, drones and lighter mass drivers the ship also carried were just icing on the cake. As long as we were within a couple of light-seconds of those guns we weren’t going anywhere.

  The salvage ships had a lot less delta V than the military vessels, and they didn’t have the option of converting a hold into extra fuel tanks like the Square Deal. So a fat tanker accompanied the squadron into the Delta Layer, and through our initial burn towards our destination. Once we were up to speed it docked with each of the salvage ships in turn, and spent a couple of hours refilling their tanks. That would give them enough fuel to match the high-velocity course the squadron was planning to take to the wreck, and still be able to get home afterwards.

  I was busy through all of this, of course. Helping Naoko with passenger service, putting together a defense plan for my cabin, building lethal toys and sneaking them into my storage space. But I couldn’t help but keep a thread of my attention on the external monitors. Watching that sleek, black ship for the moment when the turrets began to rotate in our direction.

  I figured we had less than a minute to live, if that ever happened.

  It was silly to worry about it now, of course. Even if they did plan to kill us all, they wouldn’t do it until we’d led them to the wreck. But I couldn’t help worrying. I wasn’t used to having a danger I couldn’t do anything about so close at hand, and it wore at me. I guess I didn’t hide it as well as I thought, because on the evening of our second day in hyperspace Naoko pulled me aside to ask what was wrong.

  When I admitted my fears she just hugged me.

  “Oh, Alice. I have the same concerns, as do we all. But we must have faith in our captain to see us through.”

  Easy for her to say. She’d known him longer than I had, and besides she was imprinted on him.

  “Faith doesn’t come easily for me,” I told her. “You know more about the Masu-kai than I do, Naoko. Do you think they’ll let us go if they find the treasure?”

  “I don’t know, Alice. The young lord has a reputation for honorable dealing, but his father is more feared than loved. It worries me that he sent Lord Yamashida to oversee the mission. That man has a terrible reputation. The assassins he trains are nothing but heartless killing machines, and his spies don’t even know that they’re his agents until the moment comes to turn on you.”

  “Good thing he’s not in charge,” I muttered.

  “Indeed. I must admit, I was relieved when I heard the young lord was officially leading this expedition. Although it puts you in a difficult position.”

  “I know, I know, I need to be nice to him or he might have us all killed. I don’t think he’d really do that, Naoko. Did you know he wants to reform the Masu-kai?”

  “Does he? Will he stop selling ships to the pirate clans, then?”

  “That would be pointless. There are hundreds of modern nations in the Kerak sector, and probably five times that many megacorps. Unless someone manages to unite all those colonies there’s always going to be someone eager to sell ships to outlaws, so it might as well be the Masu-kai. The same goes for smuggling, and a lot of the other routine crime. But he wants them to stop inventing disgusting new vices to sell, and build an economy that isn’t so dependent on catering to the underworld.”

  “Really? Would he shut down Lord Ishida’s exotic android projects?”

  “Yes, absolutely. He thinks it’s completely dishonorable to intentionally make people who’ll be miserable with their lives, and isn’t that half the point of what Ishida does? But even if you ignore the moral issues, it’s a stupid business to be involved in. There’s no money in it, because there aren’t many people twisted enough to pay for that kind of thing, and the customers they do have aren’t that rich. Ishida might make friends with a few perverted politicians here and there, but he makes way more enemies than allies.”

  She hugged herself. “It would greatly please me if that operation were shut down, Alice. But I don’t know if I can believe it. You do realize that a change like that won’t come without a price, don’t you? Do you really think he’d be willing to kill Lord Ishida over this?”

  “Actually, when he found out that we’re friends he kind of hinted that he’d be willing to let me do it.”

  Naoko stared at me in shock. I smiled, and put my hand on hers.

  “Hey, no one gets to hurt my friends and get away with it. Even if it’s something that happened before we met. Anyway, I don’t see why Akio would lie to me. I’d find out the truth eventually. How would he ever be able to trust me if I was mad at him over a betrayal like that?”

  “Matters are seldom so clear-cut, Alice,” she said gently. “There are always plausible reasons to put off a difficult task until tomorrow, and a series of temporary delays can easily become a permanent policy. Not to mention that your judgment may not be so clear if you become as close as he seems to hope. Even a normal girl would forgive her first love a great many failings, and you are far from normal.”

  “Hey, what’s that supposed to mean? I’m not in love with the guy,” I protested.

  “No, but you are interested,” she insisted.

  “Well… yeah, maybe I am. He’s not what I expected.”

  “He’s strong, confident and very sexy,” she teased. “I’d be surprised if his attention didn’t give you ideas, Alice. But do you really think you can experiment, and still keep him at arm’s length? I’ve seen how quickly you bonded with the rest of the crew. Myself, the techs, even Emla.”

  “You’re my friends, Naoko. Isn’t that a good thing?”

  “That depends on who you choose to befriend, Alice. I like to consider myself a good person, but let me ask you something. Would you kill to protect me?”

  “Of course! What kind of question is that?”

  “What about bystanders? Say, if I were captured by some tyrannical colony, and the only way to save me from torture was a military drop on the city?”

  “I’d nuke the place without blinking,” I assured her. “Where are you going with this, Naoko? I promise, no matter what happens, I’ll always be there for you.”

  “That was my point, Alice. Or have you really never considered that a normal girl would hesitate at such things? Would the answer be different if I merely wanted you to murder some stranger for insulting me?”

  “Um.”

  I suddenly realized what I’d just said. Killing people is supposed to be wrong, isn’t it? If I led a military drop on a city to rescue a friend, a lot of innocent people would die. Shouldn’t I care about them too?

  My upbringing said I should. That just having to think about it made me a monster. But my instincts said that one friend is worth more than a million strangers. I didn’t know which side to listen to.

  My instincts were perfectly fine with the idea of beating up some rude jerk to salve Naoko’s feelings, too. Or even killing him, if that wasn’t enough. What kinds of horrible things would I be willing to do just to make a friend smile?

  I found that I wasn’t happy about the answer to that question.

  “Oh,” I said weakly.

  “Indeed. Oh.”

  “Am I a monster, Naoko?”

  “No, not at all. Alice, this is a common thing for people like you. You don’t have any particular urge to go out and hurt people for your own sake, do you?”

  “No! I, I don’t want to hurt people, Naoko. I just, I can’t let anything happen to my friends.”

  She gave me a gentle smile. “Thank you, Alice. That fierce protectiveness is a common thing among warrior breeds, and I appreciate your care. Just remember that it can lead you to excess if you aren’t careful. If you ever do find yourself in a situation like that I advise you to keep control of your anger, and don’t let it drive you to do things you’ll regret. But that was not my main point. Alice, do you think you will be less attached to your first boyfriend?”

  Oh. Oh, my.

  “Probably not,” I reluctantly admitted. “If sex is really as
big a deal as the vidshows make it seem-”

  “I suspect that your experiences will make romance vids look tame in comparison,” she interrupted. “People have been enhancing that aspect of their lives since the earliest days of medical technology, and we’ve already seen a tendency towards extreme sensory mods in your design. Combine that with the close attachment to your friends, and I’d advise you to be very careful about who you open your heart to. You could find yourself swept away all too easily.”

  “I’m not sure if that sounds terrifying or awesome,” I told her.

  “Perhaps both?” She suggested.

  “Maybe so. Um, alright, I see what you’re getting at. The way I am, maybe I could get taken advantage of if I’m not careful. But how would Akio know any of this?”

  “It’s hardly a mystery, Alice. No one gives out extreme supersoldier packages without taking steps to ensure they aren’t misused. An enhanced loyalty to your own tribe is the least of the possibilities. I still fear that there is likely to be a control mechanism hidden somewhere in your design, although the captain disagrees.”

  “What does he think?”

  She sighed. “He thinks your abilities are due to a more general transhumanism project, rather than a specialized spy or soldier program. In that case you might simply have ‘improved’ social instincts of some sort, rather than something intended to control you. But considering how normal humans react to that sort of thing, I rather hope that he’s wrong.”

  I hung my head. “What if he isn’t?”

  Naoko put her hands on my shoulders, and searched my face for a long moment. She seemed saddened by what she found there.

  “Then I shall help you hide it for as long as you can, my friend,” she finally said.

  My sigh of relief was probably more revealing than was wise, but I didn’t care. I hugged her.

  “Thank you, Naoko.”

  “Any time, Alice. You know, you are not the only one in the room with enhanced social bonding instincts. No matter what happens, I shall always be on your side.”

  Hearing her say that made me feel a little better about my personal problems, but it didn’t change our immediate situation. When the invitation to the planning meeting arrived it was a welcome distraction.

  The captain and I took the Speedy Exit over to the yakuza frigate, with Emla and Chief West providing their usual escort services. We docked at a mooring point on the outside of the ship instead of landing in a hanger, and I wondered whose idea that was. Did the captain want to be able to detach and flee in a hurry, or were they trying to make sure we didn’t smuggle any nukes on board? Not that a nuke in the hangar bay would destroy a ship this size, but I’m sure it would be a hassle.

  Akio had sent a squad of his own inugami to escort us to the conference room, and the greeting he gave me was warm enough to border on improper. Against my better judgment, I felt the knot of tension in my belly ease a little. I couldn’t be too friendly in return, though, because there were a lot of people in the room. Lord Yamashida and some of his flunkies, the captains of the salvage ships, a couple of marine officers, and a whole bunch of managers from the shipyard workers.

  Looking around the room, it struck me that out of all the Masu-kai minions the only men were the captains of the two salvage ships. All the rest, from the yard dogs to the marines, were women. Mostly canine morphs, and it seemed to me that the further their position would put them from direct contact with their masters the less human they looked.

  A social engineer could probably figure out a lot about Masu-kai society from that. I wasn’t too sure about the subtler implications. Was it some kind of human supremacist message, or just a convenient way to make an android’s social status obvious at a glance?

  “I believe you said something about a map of the wreck, Captain Sokol?” Akio opened the meeting.

  The captain nodded, and pulled up an image on the holoprojector.

  “Yes, although I recommend against relying on it too heavily,” he said. “The external images are from the Square Deal’s sensors, but our expeditions into the interior have mapped only a tiny fraction of the ship. Given the difficulty of getting any kind of sensor reading through the ship’s armored bulkheads, much of this remains conjecture.”

  Gaia, but this ship was huge. I knew battleships were big, especially in the Inner Sphere, but there’s a difference between reading about something and seeing it. I ate a copy of the raw data so I could visualize the scale properly, and took a moment to marvel at it.

  Before her final battle the Emperor’s Hope must have been twenty thousand meters long. Her general layout was similar to the frigate we were on, although she was a lot bulkier. Nearly five thousand meters across the beam, and forty-three hundred meters from top to bottom. Instead of mass drivers, her gigantic turrets had held beam directors for graser cannons that could probably cut a frigate in half from ten million kloms away.

  Hundreds of smaller turrets had mounted an assortment of mass drivers and lighter grasers, all carefully arranged so they wouldn’t block the firing arcs of the main guns. Long trenches in the armored hull sheltered thousands of point defense lasers, not little UV lasers like the Square Deal carried but big x-lasers with enough firepower to pick off attack craft as well as missiles. The armored belts along the ship’s flanks had been more than a hundred meters thick, and the cavernous hangars behind that armor had held thirty billion cubic meters of drones and battle riders.

  But all of that stupendous firepower hadn’t been enough. What remained of the ship was a mass of twisted wreckage only eighteen kloms long, with the fusion torch wrecked and much of the bow completely gone. Two of the twelve main turrets were missing as well, and seven more were very obviously wrecked. The secondaries were even more of a mess, and practically every square meter of the hull was covered in signs of battle. Huge impact craters from multi-gigaton RKKV impacts, and long trenches gouged out by graser cannons. Millions upon millions of smaller craters, from drone strikes and mass driver bombardments. Deep wounds where the outer armor had been ripped apart by repeated hits, exposing vast expanses of wrecked machinery.

  For all that, the damaged sections probably accounted for less than a third of the great ship’s mass. I could barely imagine the level of self-repair a ship like this would be capable of, but I suspected it was the boarders that had finally taken it out of action.

  “Once the point defense batteries were destroyed they must have swarmed the ship,” Captain Sokol was saying. “Everywhere we went, we found masses of dead warbots. The Mirai models are all destroyed, as are most of the boarders. But there are a concerning number of intact ones as well. It seems that the Swarmlords did not equip their forces for an extended stay, and the vast majority of them were powered by nuke packs that have long since decayed. But we’ve had several rather hair-raising encounters with fusion-powered cybertanks coming out of standby mode.”

  “I take it this is the factor that limited your explorations?” Lord Yamashida interjected.

  “My crew weren’t eager to meet any more of those things,” Sokol agreed. “The small ones are about twelve tons, but they’ve got the firepower and armor you’d expect from a twenty-ton machine. There are heavier ones in some of the cargo spaces, including some big thousand-ton models, and we didn’t want to risk waking one up.”

  Akio frowned at the display. “That’s probably the wrong area anyway. Those holds are pretty close to the ship’s hull, and they look like they’re full of mining equipment. The gold is probably in a more protected location.”

  One of the yard dogs raised her hand. “My lord? According to our information, Mirai capital ships frequently had secure holds located near the centerline in this region.” She indicated an area about four kloms forward of the ship’s midpoint, between the second and third gun turrets.

  “Why would we care about cargo holds?” I asked curiously.

  “I would expect a girl in your position to be more interested in wealth,” Yamashida said.
/>
  I huffed. “My point is, why would the gold be in a cargo hold? It was supposed to be part of the rare element reserve for this holdout colony, not a stash of money. So why would they have shipped it as bars? It’s probably in a big feedstock tank somewhere.”

  Captain Sokol facepalmed. “Out of the mouths of babes.”

  “That does seem logical,” Akio mused. “Testing the theory could be problematic, though.”

  I looked at the display again. Several of the ship’s hangar bays had been filled with industrial equipment, and prefab housing modules that were obviously meant to hold colonists. There were giant tank farms attached to the fabricator bays, which to me seemed like the obvious place to look. They must have been some kind of military design, because the storage tanks were embedded in a giant armor matrix that had protected them pretty well from the fighting. But surely it wasn’t that big an obstacle.

  “The armor on those tanks is only thirty cems thick,” I said. “Can’t we just cut them open with a mining laser or something?”

  The yard dogs all winced at that. Akio slowly shook his head.

  “That’s all smart matter armor matrix, Alice, and it looks like it’s bonded to the rest of the ship. That means it’s tied to the heat management network, and the Mirai are famous for their damage control systems. There’s no way to destroy the embedded computer network without physically melting the whole ship, and if we give it an energy source it’s going to wake up.”

  “He’s right, my lady,” one of the yard dogs said apologetically. “Even our biggest cutting beams would take several hours to burn through that much armor, and the ship would recover three or four percent of the waste heat as useable electricity. If there’s an intact fabricator anywhere on this ship, it could power up and start making warbots.”