Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1)

by E. William Brown

  “Yes, ma’am,” Lina agreed.

  This time I wasn’t trying to keep a low profile, or hide the fact that my team had more warbots than the others. The results were pretty painful for Yamashida’s troops.

  They kept trying to smoke up and snipe from a distance, using the cameras built into the ship’s corridors to give them an idea of where I was. But their own smoke made their point defense lasers useless, and I’d split up half of my tritium supply to make a few dozen plasma warheads to put on my micro-missiles. The yield on the micro-fusion devices was only a tenth of a kiloton, but that was more than enough to wreck a squad of bots.

  Half the marines that were trying to keep me pinned down in the detention block died to a plasma warhead, and then we overran their position and wiped out the ones that were hiding around corners. The next two groups didn’t do any better, and then we were storming the security control room. It was protected by the same kind of blast door as the detention center, but by that point Lina had gotten my destructor bot working again. After we’d tunneled through the door the techs inside weren’t much of a challenge.

  My wireless datalink came back up as Emla and I cleared the room. I smashed one last security goon to pulp against the wall, and answered another call on Akio’s secret com network. This time it was a perky-looking catgirl on the line instead of Akio.

  “Lady Long? I’m Agent Hana with DS Team Three. We’re just down the hall from you, and ready to move in at your command.”

  “Great, the security room is all yours. Can you get me datalinks to my other teams?”

  “We’re on it, my lady!”

  Six catgirls dressed in armored spacesuits hurried into the room, and took over some of the consoles. Just as they started to work the ship bucked violently, the inertial compensators failing to completely even out an unexpected acceleration change.

  “Too late,” I observed. “That was a demo charge taking out the main drive. Get me those datalinks, and then do what you can to feed me intel and confuse the enemy. I don’t suppose you know where the ship’s self-destruct device is?”

  “Yes, my lady,” a calico catgirl answered. “We have the uncensored plans for the ship. But we don’t have anyone who can disarm it safely.”

  “What, is it an antimatter device or something?”

  “Of course not, my lady. That would be crazy. It’s just a fusion bomb inside an armored box, but the whole thing has extensive tamper-proofing.”

  “No problem, then. I’ve still got another demo charge. Just pass the word to get our people out of that part of the ship”

  She blanched. Silly spy types, always ignoring the simple solution. A nuke is a delicate piece of precision machinery, and you can’t set one off by blowing it up. Taking it out with my own nuke was perfectly safe.

  Or maybe she was just concerned about the fact that it was buried near the center of the ship, and the venting system that protected most compartments from internal detonations didn’t extend there. A forty kiloton explosion was going to cause all sorts of havoc.

  Well, good. The more confusion the better, because I didn’t have nearly as many bots as I would have liked. I had to leave a fire team behind to guard the security room, and most of the distraction team back in engineering had gotten blown up by my own bombs. I’d have to leave guards with the one I put on the self-destruct device, too, or the enemy would probably find and disable it before I could get to a safe distance.

  Then again, they might not realize what I was after. The self-destruct bomb was inside the hyperspace converter, right in the middle of the ship. The bridge was just forward of the hyperspace converter, so it would look like that’s where I was going. Maybe I could do something with that?

  I left Lina in the security room, thinking it was the safest place for her to be right now. Then I had to fight my way through a long maze of corridors and maintenance spaces to get to the bomb, although the going rapidly got easier as the techs worked to feed me information. Before long I had feeds showing me where most of the enemy marines were, which made it a lot easier to avoid or roll over their attempts to set ambushes. I also got back into contact with my other teams, finally.

  There was an odd moment of dissonance when I restored the connections to the copies of myself that were running those bots. A momentary sense of cautious evaluation, before we merged back together into a seamless whole. We were all the same Alice, still, but I got the feeling that might not be true if we were separated for too long.

  I didn’t have time to worry about that, though, because the enemy had started getting desperate. They were taking a pounding from the Sleeping Dragon ships, and they must have been pretty anxious to keep me from doing any more sabotage.

  A normal gunbot couldn’t penetrate my team’s massed deflector shields, but they’d broken out some tanks that had much heavier weapons. They also started using their own plasma warheads, apparently deciding that damaging the ship was better than letting me continue my rampage. But neither move did them much good.

  The first time I encountered a spider tank I’d already seen it coming in the data feeds I was getting, so I knew not to walk around the corner it was covering. Instead I sent in a cloud of invisible, insect-sized bots floating down the corridor to drop loads of paint and caustic chemicals on its sensor pickups. When the tank’s escort of close assault bots responded by hosing down the area with plasma flamers I used the distraction to have a gunbot pop around the corner and put a particle beam through the tank’s reactor.

  Yes, my weapons were heavy enough to penetrate anything they could throw at me. Just one of the perks of a tech advantage.

  Their slow, bulky plasma missiles were equally useless, since I never blocked my own point defense by hiding my whole formation behind a wall of smoke. Instead I kept smaller clouds trapped between the layers of my deflector shields, using them to hide myself and Lina while still leaving plenty of my bots with clear fields of fire. Thanks to my superior lasers it was easy to shoot down their missiles before they got anywhere near me.

  I lost a few of my smaller bots to mines and cannon fire, but the threat I was really concerned about never materialized. They didn’t seem to have any decent lasbots. Like a lot of less professional military forces they just assumed that lasers were useless, because everyone would always be covered by smoke. That mistake made things a lot easier for me.

  They tried to overwhelm me with numbers next. I softened them up with one of my remaining plasma warheads, and then merrily carved a path through the heart of their formation. The marines fell back frantically, throwing in more bots to slow me down as they tried to avoid contact. I picked a couple of them off with assassin bots, clever things of animated liquid that were even better at cloaking than my normal units. Too bad my regular bots were all too hot to cloak by this point, or they’d really be in trouble.

  They were worried, but they weren’t quite panicking yet. How could I turn up the pressure a little more?

  Maybe a little drama would do the trick. I unlimbered my hammer, had Emla merge the two bodies that were still with me, and waded into the melee with a two hundred kilogram dragon at my back.

  A blast of plasma washed over my shields. I danced through a hail of cannon fire, smashing bots into the bulkheads left and right. Another thread of attention logged into the ship’s PA system, so I could chat with my opponents while I fought.

  “Hey, little puppies. Are we having fun yet?”

  My hammer’s rocket filled the whole corridor with atomic fire, melting smaller bots and blinding the big ones. I spun in a full circle and brought the business end down on an oversized melee bot that had tried to charge through the fire, crushing it into the deck.

  “You came to my ship and took something of mine. Now it’s my turn to take something of yours.”

  Emla intercepted a pair of heavy assault bots that were scrambling to meet me, and tore them apart with claws and teeth. Strange Loop Sleuth had done some neat work on using short-range manipu
lator fields as cutting implements, and the shriek of tortured metal that erupted whenever her claws made contact with a bot was just the right touch.

  I flitted down a corridor, slapping more bots out of my way as I went, and got line of sight on one of the marines. A blast from my particle beams took her head off.

  “Aw. Bad move, Hyun-mi. Maybe one of your squad mates can do better. Nana?”

  My last assassin bot dropped off the ceiling to land on another marine’s back. It drove dozens of little spikes into the neck joint of her armor, popping the seal and allowing it to follow up with a spray of disassemblers. The inugami screamed as the nanobots ate into her neck, and then collapsed with a horrible gurgling noise.

  “No? What about you, Eun-mi?”

  My four remaining gunbots fired in unison, burning through two walls and a mass of machinery that wasn’t nearly as solid as it looked. The hapless marine was just starting to stiffen at the sound of her name when the particle beams punched through the wall she was hiding behind, and made equally short work of her armor.

  “Come on, that was pathetic. Don’t any of you puppies know how to bite? In-sook? Ye-jin?”

  I flashed through the increasingly disorganized mob of bots to smash a marine into paste with my hammer, while a cloaked micro-missile with a plasma warhead snuck around two corners and went off close enough to catch another one.

  Then I was surrounded by bots that really wanted me dead, and for a minute I was too busy fighting to pull off more precision strikes. But the damage was done. The enemy marines were pulling back in a hurry, sending waves of bots in to keep me busy while they ran for their lives. I giggled.

  “Aw, running away already? That’s okay, puppies.”

  I sent an email to each of their personal accounts. Each one said ‘I know where to find you’, under a picture of her bunk.

  “You’re having way too much fun with the data Akio’s agents are giving us,” Emla told me.

  “The more scared they are, the worse they’ll fight,” I explained. “These bots are annoying, but they’re a lot less dangerous without close supervision.”

  By the time we finished off the mob I’d lost a couple more shield drones, and my melee bots were getting damaged enough that it was starting to affect their performance. But we’d finally reached the armored box around the self-destruct device. I put a couple of bots to work finding a good spot to plant the demolition charge, while I took a break to cool off. Even in an atmosphere, using my suit to its full potential generated heat way faster than I could get rid of it.

  I took stock of the situation while I waited for my radiators to stop glowing. The distraction squad I’d sent after Yamashida had finally been wiped out, but they’d taken hundreds of warbots and several squads of marines with them. The few survivors from the group back in engineering had linked up with the fire team guarding the security room, so Lina and Akio’s agents there were reasonably safe.

  The ship had definitely seen better days, though. It was quickly running out of escorts, and more and more of the Sleeping Dragon drones were getting close enough to make attack runs. Most of the missiles were still getting destroyed before they could reach attack range, but not all of them. Here and there a standoff missile detonated, sending jets of plasma lancing out to wash over the ship’s buckling shields. Sometimes they got through, washing over the hull and burning away some of the point defense lasers that struggled to keep them at bay.

  If that was the only threat it might have taken another hour for the gradual accumulation of battle damage to become catastrophic. But the big guns on the Sleeping Dragon frigate were pounding away, punching holes in the ship’s shields and blowing huge craters in her armor. One of the smaller gunboats had retreated, badly damaged by the Masu-kai’s return fire. But the other one was still blazing away, and the combined weight of fire was doing a lot more damage than the drones. One of the main mass drivers had already been knocked out, along with several secondary batteries and a lot of shield emitters.

  The shields were crucial. Without a layer of deflector shields to slow down incoming projectiles, the ship’s armor wouldn’t be able to stop the heavier mass driver rounds. They’d punch right through, and start wrecking internal systems. Things would go downhill fast once that started happening.

  I’d be a lot more enthusiastic about the yakuza getting their butts kicked if I wasn’t still on this ship. It would really suck to get blown up by friendly fire. Maybe my bomb would do enough damage to knock them out of the fight?

  My radiator temperature finally dropped below a thousand Kelvins. Time to get moving again. I wanted at least two armored bulkheads between me and this bomb before I set it off. I left a fire team behind to guard the bomb, and took off towards the bridge with my last fire team.

  I didn’t get very far before the whole ship lurched wildly, and the artificial gravity went out. The compartments groaned and twisted around me, and a series of bangs and crashes echoed through the corridors. I shook my head, momentarily disoriented.

  “What was that?” Emla asked.

  “Hyperspace transition,” I told her. “Gaia’s breath, what are these nutjobs doing? Forcing a transition out of the Delta Layer in a ship that’s taken this much damage? The stress could have torn the ship apart.”

  Scanning the status reports, I saw that it just about had. The aft section of the ship, where my demo charges had done most of their damage, was warped and twisted like some kind of crazy abstract sculpture. What were they up to? The ship wasn’t going anywhere in this condition, and the mercenary squadron would just follow us down. It might take them a few minutes, because they weren’t going to do any crazy unplanned crash transitions, but so what?

  The gravity didn’t come back on. Instead there was a rumbling vibration in the machinery all around the maintenance tunnel I was floating through. Back where my last fight had taken place gouts of steam erupted from damaged piping, and then the exterior view showed a massive clout of superheated vapor enveloping the ship.

  They were crash cooling the hyperspace converter? I guess they could afford to, since they weren’t going to be using any of that water as reaction mass for the ship’s drive. So maybe they could get down to the Beta Layer before anyone caught up with them, and buy another fifteen or twenty minutes of breathing room. That still wasn’t enough to do anything, was it?

  A com from Akio interrupted my confusion. “Alice! Uncle Noburu is on the move.”

  “He is? I thought he’d be hiding on the bridge.”

  The ship’s bridge and the command facilities around it were protected by even more armor than the detention center, and my destructor bot was out of solvent. I hadn’t even considered trying to go after him for real, because I assumed trying to break in would be a lost cause.

  “He was,” Akio confirmed. “But he just sent another detachment of marines to reinforce the guard on the hanger where the captain’s pinnace is stored, and his bodyguards are getting ready to exit the bridge. They’ll be opening the blast doors soon, but he’s got every marine left on this ship headed in that direction.”

  “Well, crash. That would be a nice opportunity, but I’d never get through that many bots fast enough to keep him from running away. Wait, does the pinnace have a hyperspace converter?”

  “I don’t know. He had the usual pinnace replaced with another model while the expedition was being organized, and no one seems to have any information on it. My techs think it looks pretty stealthy, though.”

  “Do you have pictures?”

  “Sure.”

  I glanced over the images he sent me. Yeah, that was some kind of high-performance stealth ship. It was way too small to be able to get into the Delta Layer, but a good engineer might be able to pack enough power into that hull to reach the Gamma Layer. It would take months to limp home that way, but they’d get there eventually.

  There wouldn’t be enough room for all of his people, but a guy like Yamashida wouldn’t care. He’d leave them behind
to fight on for as long as they could, and then set off the self-destruct bomb to hide the fact that he’d gotten away. All he needed was a chance to launch his escape ship when no one was looking.

  “This jerk is not going to sneak away,” I growled. I looked over the ship’s deck plans, thinking furiously. There were too many ways to get from the bridge to that hangar. If I tried to intercept him he’d just divert to a different route, and if I went for the hanger he’d be on his escape ship before I could fight my way through all the guards. But I was getting used to coming up with crazy plans, now. This one was easy.

  “Akio, can your people open up lift tube 37-C all the way down to deck one, and shut down the lift field?” I asked.

  “Ummmm, yes, they say they can make that happen. But there are security cameras all along that route, and we can’t shut them down. They’ll see you coming.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for. At my direction Emla ripped a long gash in the side of a coolant pipe, and a spray of pressurized water arced out to wash over us. It instantly vaporized when it struck my overworked radiators, and the tunnel quickly filled with live steam. But it carried off amazing amounts of heat in the process, and my radiator temperature plummeted. It wasn’t long at all before my bots and I were all back down to room temperature.

  “He’s exited the bridge now,” Akio informed me. “It’s a short trip to the hangar, so whatever you’re going to do you’d better make it fast.”

  “I’ve got this, Akio.”

  Most of my bots had taken enough damage to ruin their stealth, but there was one gunbot that could still cloak properly. Emla’s dragon form couldn’t, since some of her active camouflage modules had been melted off by a plasma flamer during that last melee. But when she split back into a pair of dragon girls there were enough camo modules left to cover one of them. So I took that one with me, and sent the rest of the group to fake an attack on the bridge. This was more likely to work if they thought they knew where I was.