Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1)

by E. William Brown

  Then I had to focus on myself.

  Emla was already linked into my tactical command system, and she almost managed to match speeds with me.

  What do we do, Alice? She frantically asked. We can’t beat this many warbots at the same time. We don’t even have enough ammo!

  We don’t have to, I reassured her. Yamashida made a big mistake. See how the bots haven’t started moving yet? He only took over the marines a few seconds ago, and they haven’t had a chance to give new orders yet. We just need to hit them hard while they’re busy telling the bots to kill Akio instead of protecting him. If we can get out of the vault we can get away.

  Do you really think we can do it, Alice? There are six breeching bots in the cage with us, and that door is a terrible choke point.

  Trust me, Emla. We can do it. Now sync with me, as close as you can, and follow my lead.

  Alright, Alice.

  Her internal data pathways opened to me. In the space of a millisecond her body became mine to command, almost as surely as my own. Her mind opened at the same time, exposing everything from her feelings to her tentative ideas about how to handle the most immediate threats. I was shocked at that, and even more surprised that a part of me knew what to do with that kind of connection. She eagerly surrendered herself to the gestalt as it formed, and then there was nothing between us but the trivial light speed delay of our comms.

  I believe in you, Mistress, her heart sang with perfect devotion. Lead us to victory.

  I brought my shield bots under direct control, and a query arrived from Akio’s comm. I assured his combat computer that Emla and I were still friendly. Barely two milliseconds had passed since Yamashida’s order, and the marines hadn’t even started to react. We could do this. We had to do this.

  Emla and I spun in opposite directions, sweeping the space inside the cage with our guns as we moved. Two breeching bots and a marine were blown apart by the heavy slugs of Emla’s weapon, while I put a shot into Yamashida’s head before taking down the two marines on my side. Our turn kept one of the shield bots between us and the larger group of enemies out in the main vault, while the other shield bot started to float towards the exit from the cage.

  Emla had the power systems of a warbot twice her mass, and she could fire off all thirty of the heavy antiarmor rounds in her weapon without stopping. But my power cells only held enough energy to fire my weapon six times, and it would take a good ten minutes for the little nuke pack in my suit to recharge them. Fortunately Yamashida had wasted enough time talking for my internal systems to load the tritium from that transport capsule into my internal reservoir.

  I lit the fusion reactor in my chest. Power like nothing I’d ever felt sang through my network, and suddenly the drain of my weapon was nothing. Every time I fired my reactor automatically kicked into high gear, pumping out enough energy to recharge my power cells in a few milliseconds before throttling back down again. At the same time my hair unbound itself and spread out into a cloud of black strands floating in the vacuum around me. A tiny thread of thermal superconductor ran the length of each strand, turning all that surface area into a mass of radiators.

  A cloud of prismatic dust from Emla’s smoke dispensers formed around us, obscuring the enemy’s vision. But some of the closer bots were starting to respond to our attack now. A mass driver round slammed into one of my shield bots, cratering its armored hull, and another flashed through the space my hand had been in a millisecond before. Two of the breeching bots launched micro-missiles at me, and one was close enough to add a shot from its plasma flamer to the barrage.

  I called for more power, and my reactor surged. My field emitters lit up like a million tiny suns, and blocked the whole barrage with an impromptu deflector shield. The missiles blew up on impact, creating a cloud of smoke and debris that almost hid the breaching bot trying to charge me.

  Akio caught it from behind, and ripped it apart with his bare hands.

  I flashed him a smile, but there was no time for conversation. My lead shield bot was through the cage door, with Emla right behind it. A marine in powered armor tried to duck around it to take a shot at her, and her gun was pointed in the wrong direction.

  Good thing that wasn’t her only weapon. Emla breathed a huge jet of plasma over the hapless inugami, blocking her view and cooking her in her armor. I ducked past the smoking body to huddle behind the shield bot, and snapped off a shot at a missile bot someone had left in an exposed position. Akio hurried to follow me, and I maneuvered the second shield bot around to give him cover.

  But there were still an awful lot of enemies around us. There was an open area at the back of the vault where two marines and a dozen warbots had set up a defensive position, and there wasn’t any cover to speak of. More and more of the bots were turning around to face us, and the heavier models had too much armor for our weapons to penetrate. The shield bots were protecting us for now, but there was a limit to how much damage they could block before they started to fall apart.

  I picked off another marine, and Emla’s smoke screen thickened up enough to provide decent concealment as we ducked into the closest of the long aisles leading back to the vault entrance. A plasma grenade went off just behind us, and another volley of micro-missiles zipped into our smoke cloud looking for targets. But I felt them the moment they entered my manipulator field, and crushed them before they could get close.

  I was just starting to feel optimistic when a pair of gunbots appeared at the far end of the aisle, and opened fire on us.

  They couldn’t actually see us through Emla’s smoke, and they were too far away for my field sense. But the effect of their heavy mass driver rounds slamming into our forward shieldbot was unmistakable. The first hit made another big crater in the bot’s hull, and the second smashed one of its cameras. A quick calculation told me there was no way the bot would survive long enough for us to close with the gunbots, and shooting at their heavy frontal armor from here would be an exercise in futility.

  Darn it, I was not going to let Emla get shot to pieces by these things.

  I darted around the shieldbot, and threw myself down the aisle with my field at full power. I was so light, and my field was so strong with my reactor lit, I could easily hit sixty gravities of acceleration.

  The bots weren’t expecting that, and they picked the wrong response. One of them reoriented its gun to aim at me, and lined up a perfect shot that should have put a 25mm armor piercing round right through my chest. There’s no way something as small as me could carry enough armor to stop an attack like that, and dodging a hypersonic projectile at this range was clearly impossible.

  Instead I focused my field, and swatted it aside.

  There was only time to deflect it by a few degrees, but the exchange of momentum threw me hard in the opposite direction. The tungsten penetrator barely grazed me, tearing a hole in my suit but doing no real damage. The interaction also got me out from in front of the bot’s cannon, and by then there wasn’t time to line up another shot.

  Belatedly, both bots started to launch missiles and swivel their point defense lasers to bear on me. Too late, suckers.

  I shot one of the lightly armored laser turrets off with my gun, and smacked the first couple of missiles away as I flew the last few meters. The other bot’s laser grazed my hair as I grabbed them both with my field, slamming them together and dragging myself to a stop behind them.

  There was a swarm of little cat-sized melee bots bounding up to cover the gunbots, but they were too late. I ripped open the service panel on the back of one of the gunbots, yanked out its nuke pack and used the heavy lump of unshielded polonium as a club to crush three of the melee bots in a swift exchange of blows. My field ripped two others apart at the same time, and a single shot into the open panel wrecked the gunbot’s power cells and gutted most of its insides.

  Emla caught up with me just as I ripped out the other gunbot’s nuke pack. She fried the rest of the melee bots with a long blast from the plasma flamer
hidden in her mouth, and Akio started laying down fire with a rifle he must have taken off one of the marines. We’d lost a shieldbot, though, and the one that was left had taken some hits.

  “They’ll be waiting outside the vault door by now,” Akio said.

  Emla’s smoke cloud billowed out around us, but that wouldn’t actually stop bullets. Someone was alright taking random potshots into the cloud, hoping to get lucky and hit one of us. We didn’t have time to sit around and come up with a plan.

  “I’ve got this,” I said.

  At my direction the remaining shieldbot started for the hole in the vault door. It was putting out a smoke cloud of its own, which would make it harder for the enemy to target it. It still wouldn’t survive long, since there were bound to be a bunch of gunbots outside the vault just waiting for a target. But it only needed to hold together for a few seconds.

  Emla’s armor split open in the front, and she reached inside to extract a fist-sized egg shape that had been hidden in her belly. She stuck it to the back of the shieldbot as it passed, and sealed herself back up.

  “What was that?” Akio asked.

  By the time he finished asking the question the shieldbot was already charging out through the breach. There was a furious barrage of cannon fire, eerily silent in the airless room. Then the nuclear demolition charge went off.

  It was only a tenth of a kiloton, not nearly enough to penetrate the vault door. A star-bright flash of x-rays shone through the hole momentarily, vaporizing a huge chunk of gold bars and filling the room with hot plasma. But the pressure was low enough that my field could hold it at bay, and it didn’t last long. With no air pressure to fight against it expanded out into the maze of empty corridors around us in the blink of an eye, dissipating before the heat could cause us any real problems.

  The bots that had been in direct view of the explosion weren’t so lucky. Akio followed us as Emla and I flew out the hole in the vault door. A dozen or more bots had been reduced to half-melted wrecks, and the radio relays were gone. Good, that would make it a little harder for the enemy to coordinate their movements.

  “You have your bodyguard carry nukes?” Akio exclaimed.

  “Only one,” Emla said.

  “I know I can trust her,” I explained. “Unlike your guards. Uh, oh.”

  We made it maybe twenty meters down the corridor before someone started shooting at us again, and this time they didn’t have to worry about hitting each other by mistake. A flurry of light mass driver rounds tore through our smoke, and I had to strain my field to bounce the ones that would have hit us. We hastily ducked around a corner, only to find ourselves face to face with a squad of breaching bots.

  At least I didn’t have to fight them all myself. Emla tore into them with her gun and plasma flamer, and Akio was surprisingly effective with his fists and the rifle he’d picked up. But the fierce little exchange used up time and ammunition, and by the time we broke through them my hair was glowing cherry red with waste heat.

  “I can’t keep this up much longer,” I warned.

  “We just need to get outside their perimeter,” Akio said confidently. “This way.”

  He pushed off a wall and went sailing off into the darkness of a corridor that hadn’t been mapped as far as I knew. Emla and I followed, not having a better idea.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “If Uncle Noburu really had everyone subverted he would have staged a coup years ago. I’m betting it’s only the marines that he can control, and that means the rest of my agents should still be loyal. I’ve got a fallback point-”

  That was as far as he got before an explosion blew our smoke away.

  This time the enemy had a proper combat team deployed. Two heavy gunbots opened up on us with their big cannons while a smaller one hosed down the area with its rapid-fire gun, and a swarm of little melee bots charged us. I parried furiously, batting projectiles away from us with my field, but we still took damage before we could get around a corner. Emla’s armor was cratered by a shower of bullets, and a cannon round took a big chunk out of Akio’s left bicep.

  We fled, returning fire as we went. But the enemy had more bots than we had bullets, and they were swarming after us from all directions. Another brief skirmish left Emla with two wrecked smoke projectors despite my best efforts, and I was going to get cooked by my own reactor if I didn’t get a chance to power down soon.

  Alone, I could have easily outrun the enemy. Emla’s flight system was almost as good as mine, and with her emitters under my control she didn’t slow me down much. But Akio had to push off from walls to move, and even though he was pretty good at it that made him a lot slower. Maybe I could just drag him along? But he weighed more than Emla and I put together, and that would just be more of a strain on my overworked cooling system.

  He must have realized the same thing, because the next time we had to dart through a hail of gunfire to cross an intersection he fell back behind us.

  “Get out of here,” he said. “I’ll draw them off.”

  “But Akio, they’ll kill you!” I protested.

  “I have a backup. Here, take this.”

  He opened a com channel, and passed me two big bursts of data. One was encrypted, but the header said it was several hours’ worth of memory backup data. The other was… wait, what? A recording of a VR scenario? What the heck?

  I sped up my time rate, and sampled it. Oh, my. Akio and me in the Hungry Garden, kissing. His hand tangled in my hair, tipping my head back so his lips could work their way down my throat. His other arm around me, holding me tight against his muscular chest. My heart pounded, and my vision swam.

  I popped back out of the scenario, blushing furiously. According to the timestamp there was more than an hour of that.

  “A promise, for when we meet again,” he told me. “Now stay safe, and talk to my agents when you can.”

  He sent me another burst of data, with instructions and codes to help me infiltrate the yakuza datanet and contact his agents. Then we came to another intersection, and he turned left instead of right.

  “I will,” I promised.

  Impulsively I threw together a little VR scenario of my own to send back to him. The two of us meeting again on the Square Deal, and me leaping across the room to throw myself in his arms and kiss him senseless. A cut to my cabin, more kissing, and this time my top came off. I chickened out after that, and made it fade to black.

  Maybe that was too much. But this copy of Akio was going to die, and there was no way for him to get another memory update out to his backup. I had to do something to thank him.

  We flashed through another intersection, and a lucky shot from a gunbot way down the other hallway blew Emla’s left leg off just below the knee.

  “Ow!” She complained. “Darn it, I don’t have enough spare components to rebuild that!”

  “Sorry, Emla. We’re getting out of here now.”

  I pulled her close, so she could wrap her wings around me and maximize our shared field strength, and sent us zipping down another hallway at a speed none of the enemy bots could match. Most of them would be after Akio anyway, once they realized that we’d split up, and we were getting into areas that hadn’t been cleared now. Wrecked bots drifted around the empty halls, giving us cover and slowing down the pursuit.

  I ducked into a maintenance tunnel, and had Emla turn off her smoke projectors while we both blew off way too much water flash-cooling ourselves. That dropped my body temperature to something more normal, and cut my reactor output to just a few hundred watts. We both activated our stealth systems, and vanished.

  Emla wrapped her arms around me, and rested her head on my shoulder while I sent us carefully creeping through an increasingly congested maze of tunnels. I was being careful not to touch anything now, so there wouldn’t be any sign of our passage. The wreck was way too big for the enemy bots to search, so if we could just go a few minutes without being spotted they’d never find us.

  You did
it, Emla sent. You got us out of there alive.

  Yeah, but I couldn’t save Akio, I grumbled. Stupid self-sacrificing man. Now I’m going to have to be extra nice to him the next time we meet.

  She snickered. Poor Alice. You have such problems to deal with. What was in those files he sent you, anyway?

  Instructions, a memory update for his backup, and… um… this.

  Against my better judgment, I sent her the VR.

  She immediately ran it, of course. Unlike me she got about halfway through before popping out. I’d never seen her blush like that before.

  I’m not sure whether to slap him, or take him to bed, she groaned. If that’s what he wants to do with you, you’re going to be a really happy girl.

  I only watched the first couple of minutes, I admitted. Now I’m afraid to look at the rest of it.

  Better wait until you can be alone, she advised. He spends twenty minutes getting you worked up before he even takes your shoes off, and he’s really good with his hands.

  There was a moment of silence.

  I hope whoever he has running his backup system isn’t compromised.

  I was trying not to think about that, I said. He seemed pretty confident, but he thought he could rely on his marines too. Even if he’s right, and it’s really a secret, Yamashida is going to be putting reliable people in control of all the Masu-kai ships right now. I don’t see how he could take them back.

  What about the Square Deal? Emla asked.

  I changed course, sending us drifting slowly into a space that might have been a mess hall at one point. Now a cloud of wrecked bots and broken furniture filled most of the room, floating silently in the dark. I let my stealth drop, and used the infrared glow of my body to pick my way past a mass of dead plants around a broken fountain.