Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1)

by E. William Brown

  I don’t know, Emla. I hope the captain had a plan, but it’s a terrible situation. Even if they could beat the enemy marines that were on the ship, then what? They can’t launch the ship without getting blown apart by that frigate, and if they stay put the rest of the marines will just put together an assault force and overrun them.

  Someone had blown up the autochef, but there was a big hole in the floor beneath the tangle of broken machinery. I carefully guided us through, into what must have been a storage space. There were a bunch of feedstock tanks, all of them ruptured, and a little servicing station for maintenance bots.

  Is there anything we can do, Alice?

  I settled into a nook behind the last storage tank, and tried to think.

  The captain knows what he’s doing, I said. He wouldn’t have gotten the ship into that situation without a plan. Maybe he figured out some tricky way of escaping, or maybe he made some kind of deal with Yamashida. No, if they’d made a deal we wouldn’t have ended up with Yamashida trying to kill us. The captain would have made an excuse for me not to be there, or something.

  Or else he sold us out, Emla said.

  Maybe, I admitted. I don’t think he’d want to do that. But if it was the only way to save his crew, he might have to.

  My reactor had enough fuel to keep us both alive for months, and as long as we were careful they’d never find us. But sooner or later they’d leave, and we’d be trapped here. Eventually I’d run out of tritium.

  Then we’d freeze to death, alone in the dark.

  Mistress? What do we do? I don’t want to die here.

  Neither do I, Emla. But it isn’t completely hopeless. Maybe Akio’s contingency plans will actually work. Maybe the captain will save us somehow.

  My eyes fell on the bot bay. Specifically, on the charging port at the back.

  Or maybe we’ve all been overlooking something, I went on.

  What do you mean, Alice?

  At my prompting she let go of me. A gentle push sent me drifting across the room.

  I really didn’t want to do this. I didn’t want to know. But I was quickly running out of options here, and Emla was depending on me. I wasn’t going to let her die just because I was afraid.

  So I gathered my courage, and plugged the little power adapter in my pinkie into the charging port. The system was dead, of course, but power outlets generally work both ways. I spun up my reactor again, and fed a hundred kilowatts into the outlet.

  As expected, there was some kind of centralized power conservation in effect. Instead of powering up the bot bay, the current I was putting out just vanished into the endless maze of superconductive fibers that made up the ship’s power system. But it was going somewhere. A battleship’s computer systems are spread out through the whole mass of the ship, so destroying them is impossible unless you can vaporize a trillion tons of smart matter. Somewhere, a network of hidden computing nodes was drinking in that power and deciding what to do with it.

  Seconds passed, one endless millisecond after another dragging by while I worried that this was a horrible mistake. What if there were still Mirai warbots on the ship? What if the battleship’s computer could hack my systems somehow? What if a yakuza recon drone was close enough to spot the infrared signature of my reactor?

  Then the smart matter around the power outlet went live, warming slightly as countless built-in systems powered up. A weak radar pulse pinged the room. A wireless datanet node came online, and my comm picked up an IFF query.

  A query in a bizarre, nonstandard format that I nevertheless knew exactly how to handle.

  I identified myself with the ID code I’d been born with, rather than the one the orphanage had assigned me. Instead of just accepting my code and giving me access the system challenged me again, this time with a much more complicated protocol. For almost a hundred milliseconds we traded long, twisty works of cryptographic poetry with each other.

  Then it finally accepted my ID, and invited me to open a comlink. Just a basic voice channel, with no video or VR elements.

  “Hello, your highness. Welcome back to the Emperor’s Hope. How may I be of service?”

  I couldn’t begin to sort out all the conflicting emotions in the woman’s voice, especially with my own fears on the verge of being confirmed. I bit my lip.

  “Are you the ship’s computer?”

  “Yes, I’m Hope. Don’t you recognize me, Alice? I know your mother took one of my processing nodes with her when she escaped.”

  “You knew my mother?” I gasped. A million questions tried to flood out all at once, and I had to pause for a moment to organize my thoughts.

  “I was her ship, Alice. Of course I knew her. Something has gone terribly wrong, hasn’t it? How can you not already know these things?”

  “I was raised in an orphanage,” I said. “They told me I was found in a pirate base, and my mother was dead. Please, tell me who I am.”

  There was a long moment of silence.

  “You are Princess Alice Rose Long, eldest daughter of Princess Susan Marie Long, and as of my last update the seventeenth in line for the throne of the Mirai Kingdom.”

  I choked.

  “I guess that explains how you have such incredible mods,” Emla interjected.

  “Princess Alice is the only recorded recipient of the full Gen 12 Transcendence augmentations,” Hope agreed. “The process for upgrading adults was still in development when we left Mirai. Despite being the head of the Transcendence Project, even Princess Susan was only a Gen 8.”

  “I’m a Mirai,” I said dully.

  The monsters who tried to kill or conquer the whole human race. The creatures who were so dangerous no one dared to let a single one of them live.

  “A Mirai princess,” Hope corrected.

  My laugh must have sounded a little hysterical, because Emla gave me a concerned look

  “Princess. Right. Princess of genocidal monsters. Everyone in the galaxy will try to kill me if they find out.”

  “You know better than that, Alice,” Emla said firmly. “You’re still my mistress, and you know Naoko will still be your friend. I bet the techs will all think it’s cool, and didn’t you tell me the captain defended them once?”

  “I take it we lost the war?” Hope said hesitantly.

  “It was really bad,” Emla answered. “The Grand Alliance killed everyone they could find, and spread all kinds of horrible stories about you to justify it. The Mirai are like the monster under the bed for the whole galaxy now. The way they tell it humanity would have been doomed if you’d won.”

  “They are anyway,” I said softly.

  Emla shot me a questioning look. “What?”

  I shook my head. “A problem for later. So I’m a Mirai. There’s no way you could be wrong about that, Hope?”

  “The Transcendence project went to extreme lengths to ensure that personal identity codes could not be faked, Princess. I am quite certain.”

  “Fine. If I’m a monster, then I’ll use my monstrous powers to save my friends. Hope, what resources do you have that might still work, if I can power them up?”

  Chapter 28

  Eleven kilometers aft of the secure hold there was a small cluster of rooms that had once been a secret refuge for the ship’s officers. Just an armory, a workshop and a tiny barracks area with a dozen beds and a bathroom, all of it wedged in between the fuel and reaction mass feeds for one of the ship’s enormous engines.

  A section of the workroom wall was set up to be able to take itself apart and reassemble on command, serving as a secret door leading out into a boat bay stuffed with lifeboats. The boarders had wrecked them early on, of course, but that hadn’t stopped my mother. Most of the workroom was filled by the bulk of the weirdest fabricator I’d ever seen.

  “The fighting became very chaotic once the Swarmlord fleet lost contact,” Hope explained. “For several months we thought we might be able to wear them down and retake the ship. We lost most of the crew eliminating their comman
d and logistical support elements, and breaking up their comm networks. But they destroyed all of the ship’s power plants and fabrication facilities during the fighting, and there were still hordes of boarding bots roaming the ship. In the end, all the survivors could do was try to escape.”

  “There isn’t enough room in here to build a ship,” I said.

  “Not a conventional design, no. But the bots that wrecked the hanger were operating without supervision, so they did exactly the same damage to each of the lifeboats. They destroyed the power and life support systems, but not the hyperspace converters. So Princess Susan hit on the idea of making a specialized bot that could extract the hyperspace converter and some other essential components from a damaged lifeboat, and then expand and reconfigure itself into a minimal spacecraft.”

  I took another look at the assembly bay in front of me, and tried to picture that. There wouldn’t be room for weapons, or proper living quarters, or even much of a fuel supply. They’d have to spend months creeping along with one of those low-thrust, high-efficiency drive systems to get anywhere. Worse, it was the kind of hacked-together improvisation that might actually have faults in it. If something critical failed, would they have any chance of fixing it?

  “Mom was really brave, wasn’t she?” I said.

  “She was the finest noble I ever served,” Hope said. “You know, it’s hard to believe she’s really gone. Mirai are extremely hard to kill, especially the ones with the higher-tier transcendence upgrades. She escaped with two crewmen and forty-seven AI cores, so she would have had plenty of volunteers to help with fallback plans as well.”

  Hope really was well named. I’d never dared to let myself think about things like that before, but she had a point.

  “What does it take to kill one of us?” I asked.

  “You’re a nanomorph, Alice. You can recover from having as much as ninety-eight percent of your body mass vaporized, although it’s a long and unpleasant process. You also have numerous options for leaving backups in various environments, ready to develop into copies of you if you die. You can even integrate with a copy, if one gets activated by mistake.”

  “Mom had all of that? Maybe she did get away, then. She must have gotten shot or something, but most people wouldn’t be all that paranoid about making sure she was really dead. Only, wouldn’t she have come for me?”

  “If she could find you. The galaxy is a big place, and we don’t know what really happened. If she was badly hurt and didn’t have any money it could take years to get back on her feet, and years more to make any progress on finding you.”

  She was right. My mother might still be alive somewhere. Of course, if she found me she’d probably expect me to help her conquer the galaxy. Maybe genocide all the inferior morph types to make room for their betters, and murder enough humans to make the rest fall in line.

  Part of me thought it might be worth it, if only I could have a family. But no, I wasn’t that selfish. If she was alive, and I did meet her someday, it probably wasn’t going to go well.

  I pushed that depressing thought aside. First, I had to figure out a way to survive this mess. Then I could worry about the future.

  “Alright, so we have a fabricator, and I can power it. Can we get feedstock for it?”

  “My reservoirs are all frozen, and the delivery system is wrecked anyway,” Hope said. “That’s why they built that big disassembler module. You’ll need to feed it raw materials before you can build anything.”

  “We can work with that. Is the boat bay open to space, or are the doors closed?”

  “It isn’t visible at all from outside the ship. The hatch at the end of the launch tube is camouflaged, and there’s seventeen hundred meters of baffling and blast doors between that and the hanger. No one is going to spot any activity from outside.”

  “Great. Let’s get this secret door open, then. We can reclaim old bots for feedstock, and that will give us plenty of room to work. Emla, you’ve got the plans for all those funky micromachines that you’re made of, right? If we fab up a few batches, can you repair yourself?”

  “I can do better than that, Alice. Give me a few hundred kilograms of parts and I can turn into a proper dragon. I’m tired of seeing you get hurt when I’m supposed to be guarding you.”

  “Oh, Emla. You’re already a great bodyguard. I don’t expect you to magically fight off a whole platoon of marines by yourself. But if you want to go big I guess it won’t hurt anything, as long as you can change back afterwards. Hmm. After that we’re going to need a better power source. Hope, do you think we could build something out of the nuke packs from those bots?”

  “We can build anything you like, Alice. My design libraries are yours.”

  The link she sent me opened onto a design database that made the one on the Square Deal look like a few notes scribbled on a napkin. There were designs for everything from nuke packs to portable fusion reactors to big power plants designed to run a city. There was a massive assortment of industrial and utility bots, and huge libraries of software to run them. Android designs, and AI options. Warbots, tanks and drones of every description. Even spaceships. Not just little shuttles and freighters, but warships too.

  I stared at the indexes for a long moment.

  “Hope, this library includes designs for every class of warship the Mirai ever built.”

  “Yes, Alice.”

  “Hope, there are planet busters in this database. Why do I have access to… to rift bombs, and metamorphic nanoplagues, and adaptive von Neumann swarms? Wait, some of these designs were stolen from the Swarmlords! Shouldn’t this be classified?”

  “You are an heir to the throne of Mirai, Your Highness. The full might of the realm is at your disposal. The Emperor trusts his family to use it wisely.”

  Great Gaia. I was not ready to be a Mirai princess. No one had ever taught me anything about what to do with terrifying superweapons, and I knew I couldn’t trust my instincts. Not when my first impulse was to use them on anyone who got in my way. Fortunately it was a moot point, since the scary stuff was all way too big for me to build on my own.

  I didn’t dare touch the AI designs, either. They were bound to have some kind of loyalty programming, and they’d all be true believers in the Mirai ideology. They’d probably be helpful and deferential and incredibly loyal to me, considering who I was. But they’d try to convince me to see things the way they did, and for all I knew they might succeed.

  Alright, so what could I use?

  There was a collection of accessories for people with my mod package, and I immediately zeroed in on a cooling harness that would let me run my reactor at full power as long as I was plugged into the ship’s heat management system. With that I could just power the fabricator myself while we threw together a swarm of stealthy little recon bots. Then I could send them out to find out just how bad the situation was, and come up with a plan.

  “Right. Well, I think the wise thing right now is to keep things subtle. Emla, can you haul some wrecked bots in here while I power up the fabricator?”

  “You got it, Alice!”

  The work went quicker than I’d expected. Mirai fabricators were a lot faster than the ones on the Square Deal, and the recycling system wasn’t nearly as picky about what kinds of materials we fed it. It couldn’t digest armor, of course, but it was amazingly efficient about scooping all the machinery out of a warbot and leaving just the armored shell behind. There were nearly a hundred bots drifting around in the boat bay, left powerless by the relentless decay of the radioactive isotopes in their nuke packs, so it was easy for Emla to drag them over for reclaiming.

  In less than an hour I had my heat management harness, Emla was putting her foot back together, and a dozen recon bots were invisibly working their way towards the hull of the wreck. I had a huge advantage over the yakuza when it came to scouting, because Hope was able to wake up parts of her internal com network to let my bots keep in touch. The enemy would have a lot more trouble with communicati
on, since her internal bulkheads were all thick enough to block radio signals. They’d have to lay out trails of radio relays everywhere they went, or else be out of touch for long periods of time. Between that and the sheer size of the Emperor’s Hope, I wasn’t too worried about them finding me.

  My effort to remain optimistic took a hard blow when the first of the little baseball-sized recon bots maneuvered itself into a position where it could see the hangar where the Square Deal had been parked.

  “Where’s the ship?” Emla asked, confused.

  I carefully parsed through the data stream from the bot, trying to understand what I was looking at. There was some wreckage in the bay, but not nearly enough to account for a ship. The floor of the bay where the ship had been anchored was all torn up, and so was the base camp the techs had set up under it. But the big processing facility they’d been building a little further away was completely intact, and so was most of the maze of pipes and conduits that snaked across the vast space. If there had been any kind of fight that stuff would all be wrecked.

  “Did they get away?”

  I turned the bot’s sensors on the yakuza ships. Both drone carriers were missing, and the frigate had thousands of its own drones deployed. But I didn’t see any battle damage, or debris.

  “Maybe,” I said. “This is really weird. I can’t see any signs of a fight. Did the captain just talk his way out somehow?”

  “There’s no way they could have offloaded all those techs this fast,” Emla pointed out. “Besides, something wrecked the base camp pretty good. What could have done that kind of damage?”

  I couldn’t answer that, so I queried Hope’s databases. The answer that came back made me gasp.

  “A hyperspace transition!”

  “What? No way! I thought it was impossible to make a jump with a giant fixed object intersecting your conversion field?”

  “A hyperspace converter doesn’t have to project a spherical field,” I pointed out. “That’s just the most economical design, so it’s what people normally use. But we know the captain likes his tricks. If he had the ship fitted with a custom hyperspace converter it might be able to project a field that conforms to the ship’s hull, more or less.”