Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1)

by E. William Brown

  “Doctor Misra takes patient confidentiality quite seriously, Alice. But I won’t press you on that. I’m sure you’ll be happy to hear that Major Val just congratulated me on my brilliant psychological warfare operation against the Masu-kai.”

  “That’s a relief, sir. Do you think he’s buying it, then?”

  “I think that Sleeping Dragon understands the value of discretion, and will refrain from prying into the Square Deal’s secrets so long as we return the favor. Especially considering the size of the payout they’ve just earned. I, ah, do hope you didn’t have any plans for the contents of that vault?”

  I couldn’t help pouting a little at that.

  “I guess I can’t really argue about it, sir. I wish I’d had a chance to hide a few bars first, but it’s too late for that now. Is that what you paid them with?” I wasn’t sure what it cost to hire a whole squadron of mercenary ships, but it can’t have been cheap.

  “Officially they will receive twenty percent the contents of the vault in payment for dealing with Lord Yamashida, while the Square Deal receives five percent as a hazard bonus. Mind you, there was some argument in favor of taking all the gold, and ensuring that there would be no Masu-kai survivors to carry tales to Lord Himura. But it seems that cooler heads have prevailed. Unless you think Akio is likely to double cross us when we bring him home?”

  I considered that.

  “I don’t think he will, sir,” I finally decided. “He owes us, and he knows it. He takes the whole honor thing a lot more seriously than his dad does. Besides, he’s going to need our support to sell whatever face-saving story he plans on telling the other yakuza bosses about this mess. Getting rid of us would just guarantee that Sleeping Dragon tells everyone the truth.”

  “Whereas if we fail to cooperate, his agents will hound us out of business,” the captain said. “Quite so. But I notice you failed to mention any more personal considerations.”

  I found myself studying the floor.

  “I think he knows,” I said. “He was digging into my past, hoping to prove that Mom was from a Japanese colony or something. The truth would be a little much even for his people, though.”

  “Perhaps. Have you considered your own response to this discovery?”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t know what to think, sir. Finding out what I am was a big shock. I certainly don’t want to copy my ancestors. Someday I might want to look for my mother, and figure out what happened to her. But I’m not ready for that yet.”

  “Will you be staying with the ship, then?”

  “If I can. I’m sorry, sir. I know I’m a lot of trouble. It seems like no matter what I do, things always go wrong.”

  “The last few months have been a bit trying,” he agreed. “But that is hardly your fault. You know, most of the crew was quite impressed by the way you rescued Lina. You’ve been nominated for another commendation.”

  “I have?”

  “Indeed. But it wouldn’t do for you to earn two commendations as a probationary crewmember. It makes me look indecisive, you see. So I hope you’ll accept a contract of employment before I endorse that proposal.”

  My breath caught. “Yes! I mean, yes sir! Of course. Um, I guess I should ask what a cabin girl gets paid?”

  “Ah, I’m afraid there may be a bit of subterfuge in the details here. I think you’ve demonstrated that your abilities go considerably beyond general unskilled labor. But I suspect you would prefer to avoid having too many oddities in your records?”

  “Um, yes sir. I think standing out too much would be a bad idea.”

  “Well, then. Officially your job title will be cabin girl, at a pay rate of six hundred credits per month. Normally this would be a training position, so of course the pay is fairly minimal until you finish your certifications. Unofficially, however, your duties will include those of a troubleshooter.”

  I could have looked it up, but I could tell he wanted to explain it himself. “What does a troubleshooter do, sir?”

  “She keeps an eye out for trouble, Alice. And when she finds some, she shoots it.”

  I grinned. “I’m pretty good at that, sir.”

  “Indeed. Now, the pay scale for security professionals would normally run from three to six thousand credits per month, plus a share of any extraordinary windfalls the ship might receive. In your case we can contrive to keep the additional compensation off of your record…”

  I found myself slowly relaxing as he went on, carefully explaining about Merchant Association rules and the loopholes in the system. He really didn’t care where I came from, or who had made me. He was going to help me. All I had to do was play along, and in a couple of years I’d have an exemplary record as a perfectly normal spacer. He was even setting things up so I’d get a cut of the gold, and the giant fees the Masu-kai were paying him for this job. A small cut, but even a tiny fraction of that giant vault full of gold would be a lot of money.

  For the first time in my life, I had someone I could trust looking out for me. I had friends who accepted me, and a place where I fit in. I had a chance to learn whatever I wanted to, and time to think about what to do with my life.

  I had a home. I resolved to enjoy it, for as long as I could make it last.

  Appendix I – Hyperspace

  The method of FTL travel is a key feature of any SF setting, but for Perilous Waif I wanted this to be a fully integrated part of the universe rather than just a magic plot device. Achieving that ended up leading to a pretty complicated scheme, but on the good side it also adds a lot of richness to the tactics of space combat in a very natural way.

  In this setting, advanced physics research has revealed that our universe is simply one of a series of large 4-dimensional spaces embedded in a common higher-dimensional space. These universes are nested like a series of concentric hyperspheres, and it is possible for inhabitants of a given universe to travel to the two neighboring universes in the series. There is also a stable mapping of locations from one universe to another, so if you shift universes in Mars orbit you’ll always emerge near the same corresponding location in the target universe.

  The ‘hyperspace’ universes are the ones nested inside our universe. The geometry of the higher-dimensional space means that each nested universe is ‘smaller’ than its container by a factor of pi3, meaning that if you make a trip in the first hyperspace universe instead of normal space the distance you need to cover will be shorter by that amount. So interstellar travel is accomplished by shifting to a hyperspace universe where the distance is thousands of times smaller than in normal space, and no actual FTL movement is involved. The various universes nested inside normal space are collectively referred to as ‘hyperspace’, while individual universes are ‘layers’ designated by Greek letters (i.e. Alpha Layer, Beta Layer, Gamma Layer, etc.)

  The universes ‘outside’ normal space are collectively referred to as ‘subspace’. As you travel into subspace distances increase by a factor of pi3 in each universe, making it useless for travel. The average mass density also drops quickly, leaving them with very little in the way of interesting features like stars or planets. As a result subspace is normally of interest only to scientists, and is rarely visited.

  Transition Mechanics

  A starship normally moves between different layers of hyperspace using a device called a hyperspace converter, which is a large piece of complex nanotechnology. While the actual transition between layers happens in microseconds it takes at least a minute for even the fastest hyperspace converter to power up, and on larger ships a cycle time of five to ten minutes would be normal. Civilian ships, especially cargo vessels, often save money by using designs that have a long cycle time but place less stress on the hyperspace converter.

  The design of FTL ships is constrained by two important scaling laws. First, the energy needed for a hyperspace transition is relative to the surface area of a sphere enclosing the ship, so larger ships find it easier to fit in enough fusion reactors to run the h
yperspace converter. However, transition also subjects the ship to large mechanical stresses that become worse the bigger it is. Both of these factors are easily managed for Alpha transitions, which have relatively low energy costs and transition stress, but get geometrically worse for each layer beyond that.

  Making a hyperspace transition near a massive object tends to be dangerous, because a gravity well greatly increases the transition stress. Military ships normally avoid making transitions in a local gravity field stronger than 0.05g, while civilian shipping treats 0.01g as a hard safety line. This constraint applies to both the origin and destination points of a transition, which can make visiting uncharted space rather hazardous for the unwary.

  While travelers (and invaders) might like to shift rapidly between different layers of hyperspace, this is easier said than done. Each transition dumps a fantastic amount of waste heat into the hyperspace converter, which is normally buried deep inside a ship to protect it from damage. Hyperspace transitions also produce a temporary disturbance in the dimensional barrier between the layers, which makes further transitions dangerous (much like a gravity well) for a period proportional to the diameter of the ship’s transit bubble. So small ships with superior engineering might be able to zoom around changing layers every few minutes, but capital ships will normally maintain a more stately pace of one or two transitions per hour.

  Hyperspace Portals

  A few major nations have developed the technology to create permanent, stable wormholes between normal space and the Alpha Layer. While this requires a large capital investment, it can be a worthwhile project in systems that have a large volume of civilian interplanetary traffic. Unlike a normal hyperspace transition, using a portal requires no special equipment and imposes minimal transit stress on the ship.

  Unfortunately portals between the Alpha and Beta Layers are far more difficult to build. While small systems capable of moving people or sensor drones have been demonstrated, a version sized for ships would be far too expensive to have any real use. Portals to the higher layers are even more difficult, due to the high levels of transit stress that the portal system would have to stabilize.

  Several nations have adapted this technology to create a portable system for their larger warships, allowing them to peek into adjacent hyperspace layers using small temporary portals. Sometimes called hyperspace periscopes, these devices have been demonstrated all the way up to the Delta Layer (albeit with very small aperture sizes).

  Hyperspace Layers

  All universes that can actually be visited run on the same laws of quantum mechanics (otherwise ships and people entering them would immediately stop working). But ‘cosmological’ physics (gravity, dark energy and so forth) can vary from one universe to another, and universal constants can also have slightly different values. Between these differences and the increasing mass density of the higher layers hyperspace looks very different from normal space.

  Alpha Layer

  Adjacent to normal space, with relatively mild transit stress between the two universes. The Alpha Layer is ~31 times ‘smaller’ than normal space, and is heavily used for local travel within a solar system.

  With an average mass density almost a thousand times higher than normal space, the Alpha Layer is characterized by large galaxies full of dense star clusters. The region adjacent to human space is on the fringes of one of these galaxies, and contains far more stars than the corresponding region of normal space. But the vast majority of them are giants of 3-10 solar masses, which burn out quickly and produce huge numbers of supernovae. Neutron stars and black holes are also extremely common, and the relative abundance of heavy elements is far higher than normal space.

  There is no native life in the Alpha Layer, and permanent colonies are rare. The average planet will be sterilized by a supernova or gamma ray burst every few centuries, a fact that has largely discouraged the establishment of permanent human colonies. In civilized areas robotic monitoring systems track such events, and all shipping will know to avoid the Alpha Layer when a blast wave is due to pass through. In less civilized areas monitoring can be incomplete or even completely absent, making travel somewhat dangerous (especially for smaller ships).

  Despite the hazards, large-scale mining operations are often set up in the Alpha Layer to take advantage of the high abundance of heavy elements. Heavily populated colonies also put monitoring systems and other static defenses in the Alpha Layer, where they can easily intercept interplanetary traffic.

  Beta Layer

  The next universe up from the Alpha Layer, with higher transit stresses that require more expensive ships. The Beta Layer is ~960 times ‘smaller’ than normal space, and is sometimes used for long interplanetary trips (i.e. visiting the Oort cloud, travel between distant binary stars). Interstellar travel is feasible in the Beta Layer, but the fact that even a fast ship would take months to travel between adjacent systems makes it uneconomical.

  The Beta Layer is a universe where the competition between matter and antimatter never ran to completion. Instead some galaxies are made up of matter while others are antimatter, and the cosmic background radiation is dominated by a harsh glare of matter-antimatter annihilation. The region adjacent to human space is in intergalactic space, but there is a thin sprinkling of antimatter halo stars. These systems are often claimed by nations with active antimatter weapon programs, although even with modern technology mining antimatter and processing it into warheads is a dangerous process.

  Gamma Layer

  With substantially higher transit stress than the Beta Layer, this universe didn’t become accessible until the development of compact fusion power plants and diamondoid structural materials. Thanks to the scaling factor of ~29,800, a ship in the Gamma Layer can cross the equivalent of a light year of normal space in only a few days. The first great wave of interstellar exploration and colonization used the Gamma Layer, and the majority of interstellar cargo shipping still relies on it.

  The Gamma Layer is a universe whose initial expansion was slower than in normal space, and as a result virtually all hydrogen was burned into heavier elements before it expanded enough to become transparent. There are very few stars, and in fact most of the mass in the universe has become sequestered in black holes. The region adjacent to human space is an intergalactic void, making it conveniently lacking in navigational hazards.

  Major nations often build large-scale fortifications in the Gamma Layer to protect access to important systems, since the effective range of heavy energy weapons is enough to interdict access to an entire solar system in normal space.

  Delta Layer

  The transit stress to this layer is so high that only heavily armored vessels can survive entering it, making it uneconomical for many civilian purposes. But being ‘smaller’ than normal space by a factor of 924,000 means that ships that are able to use it can cross a light year of normal space in a matter of hours, making trips of tens or even hundreds of light years relatively quick. Most military vessels use the Delta Layer for its greater mobility, as do courier ships and express transports, and the second great wave of exploration and colonization began with the construction of the first Delta-capable ships

  The Delta Layer’s physics is rather bizarre compared to the lower layers, due to the fact that it has a cosmological repulsive force that becomes stronger than gravity over distances greater than a few kilometers. This generally prevents the formation of objects larger than a small asteroid, leading to a universe filled with diffuse clouds of partially-ionized gas. This medium is dense enough to cause thermal damage to relativistic objects, and can give rise to immense storm-like phenomena that block long-range sensors and last for millennia.

  Epsilon Layer

  With a relative scaling of over 28 million, a ship in the Epsilon Layer would be able to cover a light year in minutes. Such speeds would open up the entire Local Group to human colonization, so it’s too bad it’s impossible to get there.

  The problem is that the energy nee
ded to enter the epsilon layer is so high you’d need a 2 km ship packed full of antimatter reactors to run the hyperspace converter, but the transition stress is so high that even a solid block of diamondoid material would be ripped apart if it’s more than a few hundred meters across. Since both the power output of antimatter reactors and the tensile strength of the best smart matter materials are currently limited by fundamental physics rather than engineering details, it is generally believed that accessing the Epsilon Layer is impossible.

  Appendix II – Momentum Exchange Technology

  Traditionally every hard SF setting gets to have one piece of ‘magical’ tech that current physics says should be impossible, in addition to whatever you use for FTL. For this setting, I’ve chosen an exotic quantum mechanical effect that allows the transfer of momentum between objects that aren’t in physical contact. The momentum exchange effect obeys all the same conservation laws as more conventional ways of moving things around, but even so it makes possible quite a few traditional space opera tropes that otherwise would never happen.

  General Mechanism

  Momentum exchange fields can be projected only over short distances (typically up to about 2x the diameter of the emitter), and the efficiency of the interaction falls off rapidly with distance. In theory it can affect anything with mass, but to get good coupling (i.e. fast and efficient momentum transfer) practical devices have to be tuned to affect a particular class of targets (i.e. baryonic matter, photons, neutrinos). A momentum exchange device that completely encloses the target gets extremely good coupling, making it a highly efficient way to manipulate matter and energy.

  Interactions obey Newton’s laws, so accelerating an object in one direction produces a reaction in the opposite direction. They also obey conservation of energy, so large velocity changes require a lot of power. Interactions that decrease the kinetic energy of the target produce enough waste heat to make the equations balance, just like a physical impact.