Brave New Girls: Tales of Girls and Gadgets

by Kate Moretti

She stroked the top of his head. “I’m sorry,” she whispered to him—and to her mother, who had not only lost a husband but would soon lose a daughter, as well. But maybe… maybe her sacrifice would somehow help to atone for all the pain her father had caused.

  She threw Cika at the red ball of plasma—or tried. With her hands cuffed and fastened to the metal ring, her mobility was restricted. Cika landed with a light clink on the metal, inches from the plasma.

  Dr. Purmell whirled at the sound. “What are you—”

  She’d hoped he wouldn’t see the small lizard, but Cika’s coloring was too bright to go unnoticed.

  “What is that?” The scientist stepped forward. “Is that a lizard?”

  “Hide!” Viala commanded. It was another of Cika’s programmed words for when she was taken by surprise, like when her mother would drop by her bedroom to say a late goodnight. But he stayed motionless on the metal. “Hide,” Viala commanded again as Dr. Purmell bore down on him.

  He didn’t listen. He looked straight at her, blinked his round blue eyes, twitched his tail, and hopped straight into the plasma.

  And for the second time that night, everything went black.

  This time when Viala woke, her skin was hot. She was curled on her side, pressed up against the wall. The blast from Cika’s blue plasma core meeting the red plasma had broken her link to the metal ring in the wall—and maybe a few other things, as well. But it had been worth it to destroy the Einstein Bridge. All that was left was the base. The rest was scattered across the lab in smoldering pieces. Face still pressed to the floor, she squinted against the fine haze in the air, looking for Dr. Purmell.

  He sat up against the bank of computers, looking back at her. A long piece of what had once been a revolving hoop protruded from his chest. His eyes were set, and his shirt front was red-black with blood. He was dead.

  And somehow, she was alive. She sat up slowly. Even thinking about standing was painful, so she inched her way across the floor to the computers, her hands still cuffed. Maybe if she could hack her way into the starship’s central command center… but where was Cika? He was always… always with her…

  Time passed—she didn’t know how much—and finally, a hand touched her shoulder. Dr. Purmell? She cringed away from the touch, but it wasn’t him, just an unfamiliar face and voice telling her to be still. Other figures moved around the room, and she sighed and closed her eyes again. The blast must have broken through the walls. She was found. Which was good, because she couldn’t hack so much as an intercom link at the moment.

  The daises were just beginning to wilt. Viala replaced them with fresh ones and sat down beside the bed. She brushed her hands over her knees and then focused on the bed’s occupant.

  Tanis had woken three days before. His moments of consciousness were still few and far between; he continued to sleep long hours while his body healed. Viala visited each day, though for only for a few minutes at a time. She looked forward to sitting with him. The recovery wing was quiet, and the sound of Tanis’s deep breathing was soothing.

  Viala had only been out of the hospital wing herself for about a week. Four broken ribs, a broken arm, several lacerations, and bruises too numerous to count had resulted in an almost-month-long stay. When she had woken for the first time after the explosion with a truly clear head, it had been to find not only her mother but also the commander of the starship beside her bed.

  He and his people had figured out much of the story on their own by combing through Dr. Purmell’s apartment and secret lab, but Viala had been able to fill in what was missing and direct them to the files she’d found under the false bottom in Dr. Purmell’s desk.

  She still felt a pang in her chest that had nothing to do with her broken ribs, whenever she thought of the look on her mother’s face when she’d learned the truth of what had truly happened to Viala’s father.

  Viala knew she would never forget the expressions on her mother’s and the commander’s faces as she’d admitted to her own secret lab and her inventions—though none had the potential for mass destruction. The commander had relieved her of her cooking pot patch before he’d departed.

  After five peaceful minutes of sitting beside Tanis had passed, Viala stood. It was time to get back to her newest project. Just this morning, she had started working on a serum to combat the toxicity of Neris. Ironically, she had gotten the idea from what Dr. Purmell had said about Neris not letting anything that it hadn’t produced live. Her plan was to cross-pollinate seeds from Neris and some of the plants on the Skybridge. She had a theory about the atmosphere the plants grew in…

  “Hi.”

  She looked down. Tanis stared up at her, his hair even more unkempt than it had been when she’d first seen him.

  “Tanis.”

  She sank back down into the chair. She had purposely kept her visits short in the hopes he wouldn’t wake while she was there. With his dark eyes on her, she became nervous. Despite what she had meant to do, she hadn’t erased their interactions from his memories. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to do it.

  “I’ve wondered where you’ve been.” He sounded tired.

  “Really?”

  He nodded. “Jaex has been filling me in on everything that’s happened. Seems like you’re some sort of hero.”

  “Hardly.” She reached into her pocket, closing her fingers around a dented and blackened electrical component. Right now, with her new duties, she was so busy that she collapsed into bed every night. But, more and more, her secret lab called to her. It was where she’d built Cika, and maybe, just maybe, it was where she could reinvent him, too.

  “Well, hero or not, I’m glad we met on the Skybridge, Viala, daughter of Margaso Ritz.” One corner of his mouth drifted upward.

  She returned his smile. “So am I. And that’s Viala Chesney, daughter of Margaso Ritz and Dr. Kelvin Chesney.” She tapped her crisp new patch, showing the rays of a sun peeking over the horizon. “Inventor.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Leandra Wallace is an Indiana girl with a love for vanilla in her pop, shiny things, and ampersands. Whenever she sees an old abandoned house, the compulsion to go explore is right behind it. Thankfully, common sense always prevails, or she might have died from snakebite or a falling roof years ago. She cohabitates with her husband, son, and a small black dog, dreaming of one day being a full-time author. And eating calorie-free desserts.

  THOUGHTS ON BRAVE NEW GIRLS

  “Mathematics created all sorts of anxiety for me as a kid in school. Being able to contribute to the future of a girl who not only excels at mathematics and the sciences, but enjoys it as well, is an exciting and rewarding opportunity for me.”

  Illustration for “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter” by Adrian DeFuria

  HELEN OF MARS

  by George Ebey

  SYSTEM OFFLINE

  The words blinked on and off in flashy red letters every few seconds, jamming a spike of pain into Helen Hunter’s brain with each passing blip. Why the programmers at MARSCORP had decided to rig the message to blink like that was beyond her. I get it! The damn thing is broken! Tell me something I don’t know!

  She was sitting at the office desk in her bedroom, doing her best to ignore the message on the forty-inch vid-screen and focus on the task at hand. The desk itself was strewn with the components of a freshly broken rover command module, and she was working on the motherboard with a soldering iron, trying every trick she could think of to get it to wake up again. It had been three days since she’d fished the module out of the garbage… after her dad had tossed it there in a fit of rage and despair.

  He hadn’t been gentle with it, and now, after hours of work, she was beginning to think that the whole thing was hopeless. But she couldn’t give up. Not yet. The family had too much riding on it.

  “I can’t bel
ieve it! I’ve ruined us! Ruined us!”

  Helen had overheard her dad say these very words to her mom just after it happened. She wasn’t supposed to have heard any of it. But she had. And ever since that moment, she couldn’t get the words out of her head.

  The whole thing had to do with the family business—or the family gamble, as it now turned out to be.

  At first, her dad had been convinced it was a sure bet. MARSCORP offered individuals a chance to get rich through the budding interplanetary mining industry. Flush with deposits of precious ores such as titanium, platinum, palladium, and chromium, the surface of Mars was a potential goldmine for those willing to invest in the venture. But rather than send people to the surface, which was expensive, impracticable, and dangerous due to the planet’s inhospitable nature and inability to support life, MARSCORP had developed a fleet of mechanical rovers that could be operated from Earth and used to perform the mining work. For the right investment, a person could purchase operating rights to one of these rovers and set out on their own to strike it rich.

  The whole thing wasn’t without its risks, though.

  The equipment was extremely expensive, and that didn’t include the high cost of transporting it to the Red Planet. To offset this, MARSCORP instituted a policy where operators could purchase their operating rights on credit. Essentially, this set up a large debt for the operator, who would pay it down by mining and caching deposits of valuable minerals and elements. If you cached enough to pay off your debt, everything you found after that was profit.

  But it was risky. An operator with enough luck could discover a vein of platinum or nickel and be out of debt in a week, while others toiled for years before they saw any real money. And then there was the potential damage to the rover itself. If something happened to your unit before you paid off your debt, you assumed that financial burden for the rest of your life. A major risk indeed, but Helen’s dad was an accomplished geologist, and he’d been convinced that he could locate the goods.

  He’d been sure that he would set them all up for life.

  “Our savings, the mortgage, Helen’s college fund, our pensions—we had it all locked up in this. What are we going to do now?” her mother had asked in a voice filled with fear and dread.

  Three days ago, her dad’s rover had gone offline.

  Actually, it had been attacked.

  Not everyone chose to use their rovers for mining. There were some operators out there who fashioned their mining tools into weapons and went after other rovers, hijacking their caches and branding them with their own codes. Once a cache was coded, large automated drones called hover-scoops were deployed to pick up the ore and take it back to the launch barges for interplanetary distribution. If the cache contained the hijacker’s code, they’d get credit for the ore. The rover operator who’d actually performed the work would have to start all over again—assuming their unit hadn’t been completely destroyed.

  These Red Planet bandits were known as Marauders, and they were rarely selective regarding who they stole from. MARSCORP did little to police these crimes, claiming that once on the planet’s surface, each operator was legally considered a sovereign citizen with their actions solely their own—thereby signaling no liability for the head corporation.

  This policy ultimately spelled disaster for Helen and her family.

  On the morning their rover unit went offline, Helen’s dad had been about to code a cache of raw titanium for the hover-scoop when, without warning, three Marauders rushed the unit. They tore though it with diamond drills and rock hammers. The last image he saw on the vid-screen was of the lead Marauder stamping the cache with its own code.

  “The worst part,” he said, “was I had three other caches hidden close by. I was going to code them all in as a bundle for one big score. It would have been enough to clear our entire debt and then some!”

  The tragedy of it all had been too much for him to take. And he’d found he could no longer stand the sight of the rover control module sitting idle in his den. Once a symbol of endless possibilities, it now had the stain of defeat—a box of wires and electrodes that controlled nothing but a dead and useless rover a world away. In a fit of anger and shame, he’d smashed the entire module and tossed it into the nearest dumpster. Since then, he’d been sitting alone in his office, sipping whiskey and brooding over the financial ruin he’d brought upon his family.

  Helen responded to all of this by going straight to work, doing her best to put the pieces back together again.

  Helen was good at fixing things, and she’d been fascinated by machines since as far back as she could remember. One of her favorite activities was tearing devices apart and putting them back together again just to see how it all worked. When she was seven, she’d broken down the family’s holograph-grid after it went on the fritz then rebuilt the emitters from spare parts she’d found in the garage and reassembled the entire thing before her parents even had a chance to call the repairman. They were still using it to this day.

  Now fifteen, she’d logged hundreds of hours on the tech-web, learning all she could about every gear, gizmo, and gadget under the sun.

  Though her dad insisted that the rover had been completely destroyed by the Marauders, she couldn’t help but think that there was something they could do to salvage it. When she’d tried to tell her dad about it, though, he’d simply shut down and refused to hear it, defeat and despair having thoroughly gotten the better of him.

  But Helen wasn’t willing to give up so easily.

  How could she? This was her family’s future at stake. Her mind already burned with anger at her dad for getting them stuck in this situation; he’d been so confident in this scheme, so sure it would be their ticket to the good life. Now look at them, one step away from the gutter—all because he’d thought he had what it took to be the king of Mars!

  Stop, she told herself. This isn’t helping. Put it out of your mind. You have work to do.

  She’d been reading up on the specs for MARSCORP rovers ever since the family launched theirs six months ago. Though she was far from an expert, she was pretty sure she had the fundamental idea about how they worked.

  For one thing, these rovers were tough machines. They had to be in order to endure the cold temperatures and harsh conditions on Mars. Powered by an ion battery with a nuclear core, they had frames encased in layers of titanium plating, which were designed to protect the components as well. Yes, if enough force was applied, the plating could be cracked and the unit rendered inoperable. But it would take some doing, even in a case of three against one.

  There was a chance that the attack had simply initiated a forced shut down in order to protect the internal battery—something a basic reboot could take care of. But with the command module smashed, an attempted reboot would be impossible.

  Unless she managed to fix the module. And suddenly she realized: that was the answer.

  But doing so would not be easy. Her dad had really done a number on the thing. It hadn’t been enough for him to simply toss it in the dumpster. No, he’d had to kick it around like a soccer ball first.

  The box-shaped module was now sitting open on Helen’s desk. She managed to extract several busted control chips and replace them with blanks she’d taken from the collection of spare machine parts in her room. It would be a miracle if it worked. She’d been practicing microchip routing for a while now, but this was beyond any application she’d ever tried before.

  She did her best to ignore the blinking menace on the vid-screen and kept her eyes on the motherboard, her brow dripping sweat as she went to work rerouting each damaged chip.

  The task was extremely painstaking. Staring through a mounted magnifying glass and using a soldering tip the size of a needle, she attempted to trace the same pathways from the broken chips onto the blanks. If it worked, this would allow the module to process the
coded information with the new chips—and hopefully communicate the reboot message to the idle rover.

  At least in theory.

  Her hand shook as she finished the first chip. It was like trying to build a scale model of the Statue of Liberty inside a shot glass. Chip Two was even more intricate, but she finished the first pathway. Then the second.

  I got this, she thought.

  But the moment she finished the second, her hand slipped, causing the needle to cut sharply in the wrong direction. And just like that, the chip was ruined.

  “Damn it!”

  She felt like throwing the soldering iron against the wall, but a single thought stopped her from doing it. The wall. The house. Taking a deep breath, she looked around the room—her room. It wouldn’t be for long. Not unless she kept trying.

  Ignoring the pain in her brain, she redid Chip Number Two. Then Three. Four, with sweat dripping… hand shaking… eyes growing heavy with exhaustion…

  She almost flubbed the final chip, but caught herself at the last moment, and finally, mercifully, finished recreating what her dad had destroyed.

  Time to see if it works.

  “Here goes nothing,” she said as she finished plugging the last chip into its proper port on the motherboard. After checking to make sure the module was hooked into the power supply, she flipped the on switch and…

  Got exactly nothing.

  The vid-screen just continued flashing the offline message.

  “No.”

  Had she missed a step somewhere? Messed up one of the chips? Were her rerouting skills simply not good enough?

  “No!”

  Frustrated, she buried her face in her hands, unable to face the horrible deadness of it all. She’d tried so hard. Prayed for it. Believed. And for what? Until this moment, she’d been unwilling to admit defeat, sure that she could fix it. But now, she was forced to face another possibility.