Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1)

by E. William Brown

  “So they just, what, retracted the landing gear and dropped into the Gamma Layer? That’s brilliant! By the time the yakuza figured out what was going on and followed they could be outside gunnery range.”

  “Or down in the Beta Layer,” I said. “If the captain was going to invest in a fancy hyperspace converter I bet he’d get one with double-jump capability too. The drone carriers must be hunting for him right now, but they’re going to have a heck of a time chasing him down.”

  “Awesome! I bet they’ll take care of those yakuza marines and get away clean. Only, what about us?”

  I had an awful, sinking feeling in my gut.

  “Well, he does have the whole ship to think of,” I said weakly. “I mean, it’s not like there’s any way they could have rescued us. Right?”

  It still hurt. I’d trusted Captain Sokol, and it looked like he’d abandoned me. Now what was I going to do?

  Emla floated up behind me, and hugged me.

  “It will be okay, Alice. The yakuza won’t be here forever, right? If we have to we can just hide until they leave, and then fix one of the lifeboats or something. Right, Hope?”

  “Yes, of course,” the ship’s AI agreed. “Although you may want to secure a source of water if that’s your plan. The boarders remained active for a year and a half before their nuke packs decayed, and they spent the majority of that time systematically searching the ship for any resources that could be used to make repairs. The bots themselves will provide an adequate supply of most elements, but we have no hydrogen to run a fusion reactor.”

  I let myself relax into Emla’s embrace, and tried to gather my wits. They were right. This was a bad situation, but it could be a lot worse. At least I wasn’t alone.

  The thought of trying to repair one of those lifeboats with just Emla to help didn’t sound very promising, and I still didn’t want to start fabbing up Mirai techs. But I had one more avenue to explore.

  “Hope, see if you can sneak one of the bots over to where the salvage teams are working. They’re using civilian com relays, so we should be able to connect to their network without raising any alarms.”

  “Is there some reason you don’t want me to use my internal systems for that, Alice? The power you’re providing will only run a tiny fraction of the network, but I’m sure I could localize one of the areas where they have network coverage and open a connection.”

  “No, these guys are really sneaky and I don’t know what kind of monitoring equipment they have set up. They know I got away, so if they spot a recon bot they’ll just assume I had it stashed somewhere. But if they see the smart matter in one of your bulkheads power up they’ll know they have bigger problems that a little girl with a few bots.”

  “Very well, Alice. I can make do with the bots, and take care that I don’t activate any com nodes that they might detect. But it will take some time.”

  “I’ve got an idea, then,” Emla said. “While we’re waiting on that, why don’t we get life support running in here? I know vacuum exposure won’t kill you, Alice, but it isn’t doing your organic parts any good. I bet you’d be a lot more comfortable in a warm room full of breathable air.”

  “The fabricator needs to be kept in a non-reactive atmosphere,” I said dubiously.

  “We can move it. It would make more sense to put it in the boat bay anyway, since that’s where all the salvage is. Your mom was just keeping it in here to hide it from the bots, right Hope?”

  “Yes, Emla. I think this is a good suggestion, Alice. We could move it, and then reassemble the bulkhead to keep your refuge hidden. There’s no need to expose yourself to potential discovery when an engineering bot could do the manual labor for you.”

  “Does the life support in here even work anymore?” I asked.

  “All diagnostics show green, Alice. The refuge has an independent life support system, and you’ve already provided enough power to run it for several days. Princess Susan drained the water reserve to fuel her escape ship, but I can at least provide air and a more comfortable temperature.”

  No showers, then. Too bad, a chance to relax and get clean would be heavenly. But I’d take what I could get.

  “Alright, you talked me into it. How’s your foot, Emla?”

  She held up her leg, and wiggled her toes at me. “Good as new. How about you?”

  “My everything hurts,” I admitted. “I just about cooked myself running in overdrive for so long, and I soaked up a lot of radiation too. My synthetic parts are fine, but it’s going to take hours for all my human bits to heal. I’m really starting to wonder why so much of my body is natural organics, considering how fragile that stuff is.”

  “It’s a disguise,” Hope explained. “Normally you’d have converted entirely to synthetic tissue by now, which would make you much more resilient. But your development manager has been trying to hide your true nature.”

  “Well, you don’t need to push yourself,” Emla declared. “I can move the fabricator for you. Why don’t you take a look at the warbots in that design database? You like stuff like that, and I’m sure we’ll need some before long.”

  “Thank you, Emla. You’re right, I could use a break.”

  The Mirai designs were so odd that it took some work to understand what I was seeing. The regular warbots were all sleek and dangerous looking, with black hulls crisscrossed by ridges of glowing red crystal. I swear they were trying to make them look sinister on purpose. The clouds of centimeter-scale minibots that were supposed to surround them looked like swarms of menacing insects from a distance, and a lot of them even had glowing eyes.

  But on closer examination the odd frills all served practical purposes too. The glowing crystals were field emitters, based on the same incredible momentum exchange tech that my body used. They were lightly armored because their deflectors were so strong, and with a fusion reactor in every warbot they had the power to use lasers and particle beams as their primary weapons instead of mass drivers. Not that they didn’t have plenty of those, and mini-missiles too. But in a boarding action the particle beams would be their main weapon.

  They used the swarms of mini-bots as extra emitters to extend their manipulator fields, letting them make deep multi-layered deflector shields with clouds of anti-laser smoke trapped between the layers. They could also tear apart melee bots with them, and neutralize things like microbot swarms or nanite fog. No wonder the Swarmlord bots had done so poorly against them. These things were amazing.

  I felt like a kid in a candy store. As soon as Emla had the fabricator moved I queued up a worker bot and a proper bot factory, so we could start building this stuff at a useful rate. Oh, and there were powered armor options for my mod set! Finally, I could get some gear that would interface seamlessly with all my built-in systems instead of interfering with them.

  If only I could fuel the warbots. Civilian bots can run on power cells well enough, but nothing short of nuclear power will run military deflectors and mass drivers for any length of time. Let alone plasma weapons, or these particle beam cannons the Mirai favored for shipboard combat. Talk about a power sink. They were all designed to run on micro-fusion reactors just like mine, and guess what the only source of tritium around was?

  I wasn’t eager to siphon off any of my limited fuel supply right now, but I might have to. There were designs that could run on a tritium-deuterium mix, but not ordinary hydrogen. Proton-proton fusion is hard, and even Mirai technology needed a few tons of equipment to manage it. So if I wanted warbots, I was going to have to cut into my personal fuel supply.

  Well, I had almost two grams of tritium. I could spare a little of that, I’d just have to be careful not to get carried away.

  By the time Hope informed me that she had a network connection my new bot factory was working on a pair of close defense bots, while the original fabricator laid down an awesome set of fully tricked-out armor for me. The life support in the refuge area was back up and running, and I’d even been able to grab a quick snack of emerge
ncy rations.

  “Alright, let’s see what these codes are good for. Hope, I assume you’ve got some pretty amazing e-war software just in case?”

  “Electronic warfare was primarily handled by my crew,” she replied. “But my core communication protocols and networking hardware are all proven secure. I’m certainly not going to get hacked by these primitives. The most they could hope to accomplish would be to find the bot that we’re using to connect to their network, and even that would require a physical search.”

  “Perfect. Keep an eye on things, then, and pull the plug if the recon bot is in danger of being spotted. I don’t want to give away any clues, and I might end up getting distracted here.”

  I logged in to the Masu-kai network using the code Akio had given me, and found myself looking at some kind of secret communication layer that was hidden inside the regular system traffic. Someone must have been paying attention because I got a connection request in less than a second. That opened a simple videoconference link.

  “Alice!” Akio’s image said. “I was afraid something had happened to you.”

  “Nope, I got away clean. What about you, though? I didn’t think you were going to make it out of there.”

  He grimaced. “It appears that I didn’t, actually. Or at least, my embodied copy didn’t. I’m afraid that I’m technically an infomorph.”

  “You are? Awesome! I was really worried about whether your backup system would work. You and your dad trusted that Yamashida guy way too much.”

  “Believe me, I’m well aware of that. I’ve been trying to convince father for years now, but he insists that I’m just being paranoid. So, what happened? Uncle Noburu is telling everyone I bumbled into a tankbot and got shot, but I lost my datalink just after you found the mirror.”

  “Oh, that wasn’t the real Yata no Kagami,” I told him. “If you run a high-res IR scanner over the box you’ll see ‘replica’ written all over it in kanji. I was going to tell you, but then your uncle pulled his whole big backstabbing thing. Here, you gave me a memory backup to deliver if I got the chance.”

  I sent him the file, and he spent several seconds digesting it.

  “What a mess,” he said. “I’ve been vetting my own people carefully to make sure of their loyalty, but I was never able to do that with father’s marines.”

  “Well, he can’t have everyone under his control or he would have already taken over. Right?”

  “True, although the backing of the other clan lords is also a critical issue. If he simply assassinated father and declared himself oyabun the other clans would contest his claim, and the Masu-kai would probably fracture into multiple organizations in the end. The prestige of finding the Yata no Kagami would help considerably, though, and there are a number of clans who could be bribed to support his claim.”

  “Or he could just hire the Azure Star to spend a few months blowing up anyone who argues,” I pointed out. “Are you sure he doesn’t know about you?”

  “As sure as I can be. Father had my core design work done in Alzone, and we’ve both been careful about keeping the important parts secret. I have an inner cadre of agents who are used to communicating with me this way, but I’ve encouraged them to think that I just use body doubles a lot. The only people who should know the truth are the two of us and father. Well, and possibly Noriko. She’s annoyingly good at digging up secrets.”

  “Who is Noriko?”

  He huffed. “Everyone has a theory, but no one seems to know for sure. She likes to appear as a kitsune with four or five tails, and she’s been meddling in Masu-kai affairs for at least thirty years now. Everyone seems to think she’s an agent for one of their rivals, but I’m pretty sure she’s more than that. No one human could have spent that long playing mind games with so many paranoid schemers without getting caught.”

  “So she’s one of the transhuman AIs?” I said. “Great, so there’s no telling what she wants.”

  Akio smiled. “Every time I think I have your measure you surprise me again. How do you know about the Lurkers, Alice?”

  I shrugged. “I’ve met one. It seemed kind of nice, though I guess most people would have trouble relating to someone who only talks in math. He did warn me that neither of the ones who can communicate easily with humans is trustworthy, but I’m not sure how much I can rely on his advice. Did you know that Noriko warned me away from you, back at the palace?”

  “Did she, now? That’s interesting. The last time I spoke to her she dropped hints about your ancestry, and acted like she wanted to see us together.”

  “Great. I guess she’s after something deeper than the usual human social games, then. Trying to make you all so paranoid you evolve yourselves into superhuman schemers, or something crazy like that.”

  “Possibly. But we can worry about that some other time, Alice. Are you safe where you are? I still have hopes of engineering a counter-coup here, but it isn’t going to be easy. Or quick.”

  “Don’t rush on my account,” I told him. “I’m fine for now, and you’re probably only going to get one chance at this. I’m just glad to hear you’ve got a plan. Do you know if the Square Deal got away?”

  “Yes. I still can’t believe they managed to jump right out of the hangar like that,” he said, shaking his head. “No matter how good their hyperspace converter is, you’d think a transition that close to so much mass would wreck them. But they’d already dropped out of the Gamma Layer by the time our ships got there, and they seem to be faster than our drone carriers. Uncle Noburu is so angry the officers are all terrified that he’s going to execute someone.”

  “So they’re going to escape? That’s a relief.”

  Akio got an uncomfortable look. “Well, most of them.”

  My heart sank. “Oh, no. Someone wasn’t on the ship?”

  “One of the techs was helping with the setup on that feedstock processor,” he said reluctantly. “The marines received orders to detain her before she realized there was a problem.”

  “Which one?” I asked, not wanting to hear the answer.

  “A foxgirl named Lina.”

  I felt my hands clench into fists. “Where is she?”

  “Alice, you can’t possibly mean to rescue her. She’s on the frigate by now. Even if you could get there somehow, the detention center is heavily guarded.”

  “So I should just leave her in their hands? She’s a class three AI, Akio. I don’t imagine they’ll care much what happens to her.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Akio, what are they going to do with her?”

  “I’m sure she has backups.”

  “Akio! What are they going to do to her?”

  He sighed. “Standard procedure would be to interrogate her, and then either turn her or dispose of her.”

  “Interrogate her? How? She isn’t going to betray her pack no matter what anyone tells her, and her tamper proofing would keep anyone from messing with her hardware.”

  “Androids aren’t actually immune to brainwashing,” he said hesitantly. “You can’t change their core programming, but if you pull the AI core and interface it with an extreme VR environment for a few subjective years-”

  “Damn it!” I shouted. “They’re going to torture her? How can you be so calm about this?”

  “She’s only a tech, Alice.”

  “She’s my friend, Akio! I’m not going to abandon her to some horrible hell VR just because it’s convenient.”

  “I don’t see how we can do anything about it, Alice. Most of the crew are still loyal to me, I think. But the marines and bridge crews are all in Uncle Noburu’s pocket.”

  I massaged my forehead, and tried to think. The frigate was stationed a good hundred kloms from the wreck, and even with Mirai tech I doubted I could sneak any warbots on board. The Emperor’s Hope might have a working weapon or two somewhere, but there was no way my little reactor could power anything that would damage a frigate. The detention center was bound to be run by Yamashida’s people, so
there was no hope of just having them fake the interrogation either.

  Finally, an idea came to me.

  “Akio? What about the shuttle pilots?”

  Chapter 29

  “We’re doomed,” the pilot grumbled morosely. “They’ll catch us for sure, and then we’ll all be executed. I’ll never see my pack again.”

  The furry canine morph wrung her hands nervously, her tail lashing in agitation. I tried to contain my impatient response. She was obviously just a low-level flunky, and she definitely wasn’t made for fighting. Her uniform was just a pair of shorts and a halter top, without armor or even a basic sidearm, and her body was actually organic. I probably shouldn’t be surprised that she was afraid.

  “Calm down, Nari. Your master and I know what we’re doing. They’re expecting you to head back to the ship in a few minutes, right?”

  “Yes, my lady. Division Three has their daily standup meeting in forty minutes, and Director Song insists on having everyone attend in person. There are always crew chiefs who need to be shuttled over. But that’s just the problem, my lady. What if one of them reports us?”

  I turned to the pair of significantly less furry and better dressed inugami who were waiting with us. “Is that going to be a problem?”

  The taller one, an Amazon type with big, pointy ears, answered first. “No, my lady. We’re loyal retainers of the Himura clan. We would never betray the young lord’s secrets.”

  This time I couldn’t suppress my eye roll. “I know that. Akio gave me your encryption keys, and I’ve been watching all your network traffic since we met. I was asking if you’re sure there’s no one else who might need to catch a ride on this shuttle.”

  They exchanged disconcerted looks. The shorter one, a curvy inugami with a really bushy tail, answered this time. “Not for this meeting, my lady. Everyone else in our division is accounted for. But sometimes there will be managers from other divisions who show up unexpectedly.”