Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1) Read online

  Perilous Waif

  E. William Brown

  Copyright © E. William Brown, 2017

  All Rights Reserved

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  Appendix I – Hyperspace

  Appendix II – Momentum Exchange Technology

  Appendix III – Artificial Intelligence

  Appendix IV – Nanotechnology

  Appendix V – Medicine

  Chapter 1

  My last day at the Benevolent Goddess orphanage started out full of promise. I greeted the dawn from a perch high atop the tallest housetree in the complex, happily enjoying the fruits of my latest hunt. As Felicity’s sun cleared the horizon I looked up into the warm yellow glow with the contentment that comes only from the prospect of a full belly.

  My roommate, Dika, told me the other kids just saw a bright glare when they looked into the sun. Their loss. Having a giant ball of nuclear fire hanging in the sky was just too cool for words, and there was always something interesting going on up there. Today I could see an especially pretty solar prominence, a ghostly streamer of hot gas rising so high it looked like it might escape the sun entirely.

  I smiled, and tore another bite out of the zango I’d caught in my little pre-dawn hunting expedition. I was supposed to be asleep in bed, of course. But sometimes my cravings got too strong to ignore, especially when I was going through a growth spurt. The matrons didn’t mean to starve anyone, but the house bots had never been programmed with a metabolism like mine in mind. So every now and then I’d sneak out to indulge my hunting instincts, and catch a little extra food with my own hands.

  I would have felt bad about eating a squirrel, and monkeys would be too weird. I usually hunted zangos, a kind of vicious furry predator that hunted monkeys in the forest canopy. They had long limbs for jumping from tree to tree, and big hooked claws for catching things. The security bots mostly ignored them, since they were nocturnal and good little orphans weren’t supposed to be out of their beds at night anyway. Killing one without getting any scratches that might give me away was a challenge, but I’d managed it.

  Yay me. The mighty huntress triumphs again.

  I bit down on a rib, crunching it between my teeth and savoring the tangy flavor. Yum. So many things in there that I didn’t get from the vegetarian diet the matrons served. But was it enough?

  I closed my eyes, and pulled up my internal management interface.

  I had a lot of enhancements, but this was one of the fanciest ones I knew about. A rotating three-dimensional image of myself appeared in my mind’s eye, showing every detail of my physical condition.

  I was getting awfully skinny. I’d been shooting up like a weed this past year, gaining a centimeter or more every month until I could easily pass for a teenager. I didn’t mind that so much, but growing so fast burned through a lot of calories. I’d ended up with a willowy, fragile-looking build that I wasn’t at all happy with. I was a predator, darn it. I wasn’t supposed to look completely harmless.

  “At least I don’t look boring,” I mused.

  The natives of Felicity were all the same morph type, a custom job the original colonists had commissioned to help make their weird little society work. The dryads were small and slender, with round faces and soft features. Most of the orphans here at Benevolent Goddess were that type, with the usual brown skin and dark green hair. They all blended together into a sea of bland sameness to me. A herd of pastel prey animals grazing contentedly under the trees.

  No one would ever mistake me for one of them. My narrow face and high cheekbones would have stood out even without the bright violet eyes. My hair was a wild mop of jet black that fell well past my shoulders, instead of the natural pixie cut that was normal here. Even my skin stood out, a pale white with just the slightest hint of a tan despite a life spent mostly outdoors.

  Well, I could have let myself tan if I’d wanted to. But my skin didn’t do it naturally, and by the time I’d grown up enough to use my morph interface I’d decided I liked standing out. I never wanted to be mistaken for a native.

  Offworlders like me were a minority at the orphanage, but a surprisingly big one. Felicity didn’t normally allow immigrants, but there was a loophole for orphans that the Federation Navy apparently liked to take advantage of. There were about thirty of us here at Benevolent Goddess, and no two were alike. We had everything from spacer kids with zero-gee adaptations to full-on animal morphs. Too bad we had even less in common with each other than with the dryads, or we might have stuck together more.

  Oh, who am I kidding? You can’t put that many kids in one place and not have them break up into a bunch of cliques.

  I put that thought aside, and dug deeper into my interface. There was a whole thicket of yellow malnutrition warnings, complaining that my diet here wasn’t giving my body everything it needed to grow. From what I’d read that was one of the problems with extreme morph types like me. When you design a body that grows all kinds of exotic cyberwear as it develops, it ends up needing to eat things that a normal human wouldn’t.

  I worked my way through the rest of the rib, and watched the calcium deficiency warning slowly fade away. Some of the other warnings were losing urgency too. So maybe I just needed to get more meat in my diet?

  Well, no. There were a bunch of other warnings that weren’t budging. What the heck was ‘MGE feedstock’, anyway? Or ‘P-group supplements’? Sometimes I really wonder what mom was thinking when she decided to give me all this stuff.

  My musings were interrupted by a familiar voice.

  “Alice? Are you up there?”

  I peeked over the edge of the branch I was sitting on, and found Dika’s exasperated face peering out the window of our dorm room twenty meters below.

  “Um, hi?”

  She leaned further out of the window to glare up at me. “What are you doing, you nut? Wait, is that blood on your face?”

  “Oops.”

  I licked my fingers clean, and rubbed ineffectually at my face. I should have had another thirty minutes or so to finish my kill and get cleaned up. What was my roommate doing awake already?

  A moment later I heard the scrabble of claws on the housetree’s rough bark, and then Dika was pulling herself onto the branch beside me.

  Thankfully, my roommate was another foreign kid instead of one of the locals. The other girls called her a data rat, and liked to make fun of her for having a tail. Me, I didn’t think there was anything raftlike about her.

  Well, okay, she did kind of scurry around a lot, and the way she moved didn’t really look human. Baseline humans kind of plod along at a leisurely speed, content to chase you until you drop from exhaustion. Dika was all fast bursts of manic speed, like a lot of small mammals. She had some cosmetic mods too, like the furry ears poking out of her brown hair or the way her face somehow looked like it ought to have whiskers.

  But her ta
il was furry, not naked. So what if she had a habit of climbing furniture, and walls, and sometimes even people? She was so tiny, she needed the extra height just to talk to you without craning her neck. Besides, I thought the whole effect was adorable. Especially when she was climbing around the tree wearing nothing but a pair of panties and a flimsy nightshirt. She might not have a figure like some of the other offworld girls, but she was lean and fit and incredibly limber.

  I jerked my eyes away, feeling my ears heat. This was so embarrassing. I’d only started noticing things like that a few weeks ago, and I had no idea what to do about it. Dika was seventeen, and I was still just a kid.

  Her eyes took in my bloody face and the half-eaten zango, and she gasped.

  “Alice! Are you nuts? Can you imagine what the matrons would do if they caught you eating live animals?”

  “Lecture me about living in harmony with nature?” I suggested. “Like there’s anything natural about a terraformed planet with a completely artificial ecology. Did you know zangos have a little corporate logo on their bellies? I bet their DNA even starts with a copyright notice.”

  She rolled her eyes at me. “You can’t argue religion with zealots, Alice. That’ll just make them mad, and then you’ll spend a day in the Hole before they send you for Adjustment.”

  I shrugged. “You know Adjustment doesn’t work on me. What are you doing up so early, anyway?”

  She plopped down next to me with a little sigh, and turned her gaze out over the forest. “I couldn’t sleep. I’ve been feeling really restless since yesterday. I think I’ve got a new instinct package coming online.”

  I nodded sympathetically. That was one of the reasons the matrons had put me and Dika in the same dorm room. Most of the offworld kids here at the orphanage had pretty simple mod packages. Cosmetic changes, health upgrades, maybe a few practical enhancements like a computer or com implant. Nothing that was hard to figure out, or even remove if the matrons decided it was a problem.

  We were different. Dika’s parents must have been rich, because her mods went way beyond normal genetic changes. She had tons of nanotech cybernetics, more sensory enhancements than you can shake a stick at, and an amazing amount of software that didn’t come with much of a help package. No matter how hard she tried to fit in, she tended to flummox the matrons just by existing.

  As for me, well, no one was really sure what I was. The matrons always said the Federation Navy found me during a raid on a pirate base, and my parents were dead. But whoever they’d been, they’d gone all out with my enhancements. I was an infant when I was brought here, but I’d sprouted into a credible imitation of a thirteen-year-old girl in only six years. Most of the kids were freaked out by that, and the matrons had no idea what to do with me.

  Dika took it all in stride, though. She knew exactly what it was like to have some new enhancement to my body or mind activate itself every few months, and she’d always been here to help me through it. She’d helped me get a grip on my hunting instincts, and we’d learned a lot about dealing with extreme sensory enhancements together. If she was going through another change the least I could do was help her with it.

  “Sounds annoying,” I said. “Any clues what it might be about?”

  “Something social? I’ve been feeling kind of… well, promise you won’t freak out?”

  I gave her a look. “I’m the one who’s sneaking out at night to hunt down wild animals and eat them. I’ve got no room to call anyone weird.”

  She chuckled. “I guess not. And for the record, that’s really gross to watch. How can you eat raw meat like that?”

  I shrugged. “Cooked would be better, but the security bots would be all over me if I lit a fire. Besides, it doesn’t really bother me. I don’t know why mom thought it was a good idea to give me all these predatory instincts, but they’re good for that. So, you were saying?”

  She hesitated, and turned to watch the sunrise. When she spoke again, she’d switched to speaking in the Classic English that we sometimes used as our own private language.

  “Do you know about boys?”

  I frowned thoughtfully. That was dangerous ground.

  There are no men on Felicity. There wasn’t even a word for ‘boy’ in Standard Newspeak, the common language of Felicity. The closest I’d seen was some warnings about the strange and immoral biomods that offworlders used, and of course good community-minded girls weren’t supposed to be interested in that kind of thing.

  But this was Dika. She wasn’t going to tattle on me to the matrons if I admitted to not being a good little herd animal.

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  The database I’d been born with was a pretty minimal thing, probably meant as a starting point for a real education. But it covered a lot of basic stuff that our classes here at the orphanage didn’t, including the fact that people come in more than one gender.

  “Have you noticed that even the girls who were older when they came here have no idea?” She pressed. “Sometimes we get girls as old as seven or eight, and there’s no way they’d just forget on their own. There’s only one way that could happen.”

  “I know. I guess the matrons erase the memories when they Adjust them. They do that with everything they don’t like. No one here really knows what a war is, either.”

  “I could live with being stuck on a world full of pacifists,” Dika replied. “But I want to meet a boy someday. Something about that just feels really right, you know? Just, pick one out of the herd, and lure him into chasing me, and… well, I’m not sure about the rest. But I wish there was someone to practice on.”

  Ah, now I was getting the picture. I grinned. That did sound kind of fun, actually.

  “And you say you don’t have a hunting instinct. Maybe you’re just built for catching a different kind of prey?”

  “Shut up!” She shoved me, trying to look indignant. But she couldn’t hold the expression. A smile broke through, and she shook her head ruefully. “Maybe I am. Is there something wrong with that?”

  “Of course not. But you’re not going to find what you’re looking for on Felicity. If they’re pretending boys don’t exist they must think they’re evil or something, so they probably don’t even let them on the planet.”

  “I know,” she groaned. “Believe me, I know. Sometimes I wish I could just leave.”

  “I’d go with you,” I offered.

  She rolled her eyes. “Just like that? What are we supposed to pay for passage with? Where would we even go? I don’t know of a better colony to move to. Do you? Besides, space is dangerous. I’m not going to try it until I can afford a bodyguard, at least.”

  Part of me wanted to tell her that I’d be happy to guard her body. But it was a corny line, and I was too embarrassed to actually say the words. What would she think? Could she even be interested if I wasn’t a boy? Did I really like her like that, or was this just my stupid hormones messing with my head?

  No, better to keep my mouth shut. It was a dumb idea, anyway. Bodyguards are supposed to be intimidating, and I was anything but. Just an innocent little girl, as far as anyone could tell. The dangerous stuff was all carefully hidden on the inside.

  “I guess it’s going to be a while, then,” I said.

  “I’ve got a plan,” she confided. “When I turn twenty and get out of here I’m going to have all my certificates lined up for a career in network security. That pays pretty well on Felicity, since none of Gaia’s daughters want to work with computers. I’ll have access to the datanet too, so I can research other colonies in my spare time. I’ll be off this rock before I turn thirty, as long as I keep my head down and don’t attract attention.”

  “If you say so, Dika. Well, I’d better get cleaned up before breakfast.”

  “I’ll say. You’ve got blood all over your face. Wait here, and I’ll bring you a towel.”

  She slipped off the branch and scrambled back down the trunk before I could reply. I watched her go with a sad smile.

  I was pr
etty sure her plan was just wishful thinking. Being raised by an orphanage wasn’t free, and the matrons made sure to give us plenty of guilt tripping about how important it was to pay off our debt certificates once we left. But I noticed that no one ever quoted any numbers, and debt peonage was another of those lovely ideas I had to learn about from my database because it was never mentioned in class. Not to mention that Felicity uses dynamic taxation instead of a static rate system. I’d be amazed if they ever let her work her way out of debt.

  I had my own plan. It was a lot more dangerous than hers, especially since there were so many things I couldn’t prepare for in advance. The orphanage didn’t even have a datanet connection, and the matrons did their best to keep us ignorant about so many things. But I couldn’t stay here forever, so I’d just have to make it work somehow.

  A surprised squawk from the window drew my attention. Voices, when the rest of the dorm should barely be stirring. I focused my hearing, filtering out the sounds of the forest so I could make out what was happening in our room.

  “You’re going to be in so much trouble!”

  It was Kovy, from the room next to ours. That wasn’t good. She was a beautiful girl, a curvy redhead with a winning smile and a talent for making people like her. But she was more dangerous than anyone seemed to realize, and she’d been sniffing around Dika lately.

  “Please don’t tell anyone,” Dika said nervously.

  “A good girl always tells the matrons when someone has been bad.”

  Another voice, smooth and calculating. Kovy’s roommate and favorite minion, Ulin. The smug bitch was always making trouble. She was a tall, athletic brunette with a basic Amazon package, and while the Adjustment we’d all been through insured there was no real fighting in the dorms that didn’t keep her from taking advantage of her superior strength.

  “I’ll owe you a favor,” Dika offered.

  “Oh, you’re going to do more than that,” Ulin purred. “Breaking curfew isn’t so bad, but climbing around outside the housetree like some kind of heathen? They’ll send you to Adjustment, and that’s if they don’t figure out whatever you were doing out there with that roommate of yours.”