Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1) Read online

  Naoko sniffed. “Do you think I’m some sort of bot, proctor? I am a personal companion android, and my only loyalty is to Captain Sokol. I have orders to return this shuttle on schedule, and I intend to carry them out. Now I suggest you clear the pad, because I launch in four minutes.”

  “We can’t possibly get a warrant in four minutes!” The other proctor objected.

  “That is not my problem, proctor. Be advised that I also have orders to protect my captain’s property with all the means at my disposal, and any further attempt to gain illegal entry to this vessel may be taken as an attack.”

  She gestured, and the call was cut.

  “Stupid naturalist bigots,” Naoko grumbled. “Who does she think she is, ordering me around like that?”

  “I’m sorry, Naoko,” I said miserably. “I didn’t mean to cause you so much trouble. I didn’t think they’d even be looking for me.”

  She waved off my concern. “Oh, it’s probably my fault anyway. I shouldn’t have run that search on your name last night. Totalitarian governments are always snoopy about monitoring the datanet.”

  Outside, the two proctors were arguing with each other. A squad of security bots had joined them now.

  “Are we in trouble?” I said. “Can they cancel our launch, or something?”

  “Launch windows are a courtesy, Alice. We’re perfectly capable of leaving without any help from local traffic control. Besides, getting permission to ground an independent trader is even harder than getting a search warrant. Everyone knows we won’t surrender quietly, and routine criminal matters simply aren’t important enough to risk getting a spaceport nuked. Unless you assassinated the local dictator?”

  “Felicity doesn’t have a dictator, Naoko. It’s administered by a council of delegates from the sixteen planetary districts. And no, I didn’t kill anyone. I didn’t even hurt anyone, really. I just escaped before they could take me apart to figure out why their brainwashing doesn’t work on me.”

  “Well, escape from a mind control regime is not a criminal offense under the rules of the Association, and I doubt that a backwater world such as Felicity will risk making waves about - oh, you must be joking.”

  A bigger bot had come floating across the field. This one was almost the size of a groundcar, with a big laser cutter mounted on the front.

  “Naoko? I don’t think they understand that your ship has real weapons.”

  She frowned. “I’m severely tempted to give them a demonstration. Autopilot, has the control tower assigned us a launch pad yet?”

  “Negative, Naoko. Launch control is not responding to my inquiries.”

  Her frown deepened. “Idiots. This is what happens when a society starts using mass mind control, Alice. They get so wrapped up in their own propaganda that they lose touch with reality. The Association is not going to be pleased with this incident.”

  “What do we do?” I asked. “Do you need to call someone?”

  “No, Alice. Here’s your first lesson on spacer culture. Disputes with local authorities are best settled with action, not words. A cargo shuttle would need to cross the field to one of the launch pads in order to avoid damaging the port with its drive, and I suppose they think they can interfere with our movements. But as you pointed out, the Speedy Exit is a drop ship. Autopilot, I’m declaring a cold launch from our current position in two minutes. Relay our flight path to all other ships in the area, and hit the warning claxons.”

  The outside of the ship was suddenly lit up by flashing orange and purple lights. The sound of the sirens was mostly muffled by the hull, but I could just make out an amplified voice.

  “Warning, this ship will lift in one hundred and twenty seconds. Lethal overpressure imminent. Minimum safe distance is thirty meters. Warning, this ship will lift in one hundred and ten seconds…”

  The proctors scrambled back with shocked expressions on their faces. Proctor Lena backed into a security bot and fell on her butt. Her partner fumbled her datapad, and dropped it. The bots all froze in place for a moment, and then started backing away.

  My smile was back. Naoko wasn’t afraid of them. They weren’t going to stop us. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have to be afraid of those sanctimonious bitches.

  Naoko’s fingers danced across the control panel in front of her, and I could feel the ship coming to life around us. Monstrously powerful momentum exchange fields were forming in the thruster tubes behind us, flickering across the hull as the deflector shields spun up, tickling my emitters with artificial gravity and inertial dampening fields. There was something else, too. A massive potential field building up under the hull, like a bot’s lift field but hundreds of times stronger.

  “Forty seconds to launch,” the AI said. “Ready for hover.”

  Naoko nodded. “Engage hover mode, and retract landing gear. I don’t see any obstacles, autopilot.”

  “Agreed, pilot. Our ascent track is clear. The port’s weapons appear to be offline, and planetary defense forces in orbit have not reacted to our launch warning.”

  “Lovely. You see, Alice? This was just some local bigot attempting to throw her weight around. Alas, she seems less weighty than she had believed.”

  There was a subtle flutter in my inner ears as the ship’s lift field engaged, and the ground outside drifted down a few meters.

  “Hover mode active,” the autopilot said. “Landing gear retracted. We are clear for launch, pilot.”

  The bots had already gotten clear, moving with their usual fast precision. But the proctors had wasted a lot of time fumbling around, and they were still climbing into their car. Oh, and Proctor Lena just dropped her keys. I watched her grope around on the floor of the car for a moment, and eyeballed the distance. Hmm.

  “Are you really going to squish them if they don’t get out from under us in time?” I asked.

  “Of course not. Someone would surely complain, and then my captain would have a great deal of paperwork to contend with. But I doubt we will need to delay our lift by more than a few seconds. Hold on tight, now. This is going to be a wild ride.”

  “Sounds like fun,” I shot back. Just to be safe I found the control for the chair’s safety harness, and triggered it. A moment later I was held securely in place by a network of broad straps across my legs and torso. I looked back up just as the proctors got their car started, and backed frantically away from the ship.

  “Five seconds till launch,” the autopilot said.

  The proctors were still too close, but the groundcar was moving pretty fast now. It wobbled a little as the driver tried to keep it under control while driving backwards, and didn’t quite manage. Why the heck was she driving the car manually, anyway?

  Oh, well, it didn’t matter now. They shot across the thirty meter line with nearly a second to spare.

  Naoko grinned from ear to ear. “Ready, Alice? Here we go!”

  She touched a control, and suddenly we were flying. An immense burst of power from the lift field threw us straight up so hard I could feel a hint of acceleration even through the inertial dampeners. The ground fell away below us in a blur of motion. We were already a hundred meters up, and moving faster than anything I’d ever ridden in my life.

  The ship’s nose tilted up, and the main thrusters engaged with a roar I could feel in my bones.

  I looked back at the landing field, rapidly shrinking into the distance below. Above us was a solid wall of white, a cloud bank that we were fast approaching.

  Four gravities, my motion sense told me. No, wait, Naoko was throttling up now that we were clear of the port. Eight gravities. Twelve. Sixteen. How fast was this ship?

  We went supersonic just as we entered the cloud deck. The Speedy Exit barely vibrated, but the shock wave blew a hole in the clouds behind us. Thirty gravities, now. The world around us was a cocoon of ghostly white, overlaid here and there with markers for things the ship’s sensors picked up. Other ships, a few aircraft, and the stations in orbit high overhead.

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p; But not as high as before. We broke out of the clouds into a clear blue sky, and I couldn’t hold back anymore.

  “Whoo hoo! Goodbye, Felicity. Goodbye, stupid matrons. Hello, space.”

  Goodbye, Dika. Take care of yourself. Someday, somehow, I’ll come back for you.

  Chapter 4

  The Square Deal was a funny looking ship. Not that I was an expert on spaceships, but I’ve watched plenty of vidshows. I know cargo ships are usually fat, boxy things with a big fusion torch at one end and an armored collision shield at the other. Passenger liners are pretty, like giant abstract sculptures, with lots of big windows. Warships tend to look like armored freighters, with all that cargo space packed full of drones and missiles, or else they’re longer and have rows of gun turrets along the dorsal and ventral surfaces.

  The ship in the viewscreen was sort of a flattened oval shape, and I wasn’t sure what to make of that.

  Naoko had the main viewscreen set to show a close-up image of each ship the Speedy Exit’s sensors were tracking, so I had a lot of other examples for comparison. There were half a dozen cargo ships that looked about like I expected, including a big one that must have been six kilometers long. But there were also a lot of smaller ships I couldn’t identify, and some of them looked pretty odd. One had wings, like some kind of giant shuttle. Another was just an open framework of beams with equipment pods here and there. A couple of smaller ships were kind of egg-shaped. Okay, so there was a lot the vidshows didn’t teach me. But still.

  “Why does it look so weird?” I asked.

  Naoko glanced up from the controls to smile at me. “The Square Deal was originally built as an assault transport, Alice. She’s designed to land a brigade of marines on a planetary surface, and act as a base of operations during raids or pacification actions. After the Mormon Bastions crushed the Third Clone Jihad she was put up for auction as military surplus, and my captain thought that her capabilities would be well suited to his business.”

  “So she’s a warship? Sweet!”

  I turned to study the ship again. It was already maneuvering to break orbit, and the giant streamer of flame made it obvious where the main drive was. It looked like the Square Deal was about seven hundred meters long, maybe five hundred meters wide, and only a hundred meters thick. The big fusion torch drive was mounted parallel to the ship’s long axis, which made sense. A ship’s bow has to be heavily armored to protect against collisions with space debris, so you don’t want it to be any bigger than it has to be.

  Alright, so the drive was at the stern and the opposite end was the bow. The side we’d originally approached from must have been the bottom of the ship, because it had a lot of big flat areas that looked like cargo hatches and retracted landing gear. There were also some mass driver turrets, which my database was telling me were mainly meant for shooting at things on the ground.

  As we swung around the ship the other side of the hull came into view, and it had a completely different equipment layout. Those little turrets were point defense lasers, and there were also missile launchers and a lot of big deflector shield emitters. Oh, and there was an open hatch to starboard that must be the hanger we were headed towards. There was another hatch just like it on the port side, so two hangers?

  Something in the back of my head was calculating. The ship totaled twenty-eight million cubic meters of volume, and it massed about seventeen million tons right now. That was bigger than I would have expected for a tramp freighter, so I guess they must be doing pretty well for themselves.

  How did I know what the ship’s mass was?

  I turned my focus inward for a second, looking for the source of that knowledge. Okay, there was another calculator hooked into my visual processing, just like the dozens I’d already noticed. Eyeball the ship’s acceleration and the size of the drive flame, and then there were simple formulas to get the ship’s thrust and mass. That was useful.

  I watched eagerly while Naoko brought us in, matching velocity with a pretty little maneuver that left us perfectly positioned over the shuttle bay. She cut our drive, and a tractor field grabbed us and pulled us in. For a few seconds there were so many overlapping manipulator fields on us that it made me a little dizzy trying to keep track of them all. The Speedy Exit floated across the hanger under their combined influence, and set down next to a cargo shuttle.

  There was a series of heavy thunks from below us.

  “What was that?”

  “Mechanical couplings,” Naoko explained. “To hold the shuttle in place, if there’s a sudden bump that the inertial dampeners don’t smooth out for some reason. Ah, there’s the airlock connection. Since you don’t have a spacesuit we’ll give it a moment to warm up, and do an extra round of safety checks. We normally leave the hanger in vacuum, you see.”

  “I get it. Can I get up, now?”

  “Certainly.”

  I popped the safety harness on my seat, and bounced over to the viewscreen to peer around at the hanger. There was so much to see! A long row of shiny new shuttles filled most of the bay, and down at the end were what looked like a couple of asteroid mining drones. Not to mention the bay itself. The hatch rumbled closed while I watched, and there were a bunch of bots scurrying around doing things.

  “Alice? If you can tear yourself away from the view, my captain wishes to see us in his office.”

  “Oh! Right, okay, of course. Wait, you said ‘he’. There are boys on this ship? I’ve never met a boy before. This is so exciting!”

  She smiled tolerantly. “Most of the ship’s crew are men, Alice. Do try not to stare.”

  “Right.”

  She led me back to the airlock, where we dropped through a short boarding tube and into the ship.

  Some of the areas she led me through were like the inside of the Speedy Exit, if a little roomier. But once we got deeper into the ship the bare walls and armored bulkheads gave way to soft carpets and wall panels in pleasant earth tones. There were pictures on the walls here and there, landscapes from all kinds of planets. We passed through a lounge area with a big waterfall garden thing that I really wanted to stop and admire.

  “Come along, Alice. It would not do to keep the captain waiting.”

  “Okay. Um, we aren’t in trouble, are we? You seem a little tense.”

  “Everything will work out, Alice. Just follow my lead, and be yourself.”

  Well, that wasn’t very reassuring. What would the captain do, if he decided he didn’t want me on his ship? Send me back to Felicity? Sell me to slavers? Or maybe just space me, once they were beyond sensor range of Felicity’s stations?

  Yeah, okay, better make sure to make a good impression here. Be polite, and respectful. What was the male version of ‘ma’am’? Sir? Yeah, that sounded right.

  Eventually we came to a hatch flanked by a pair of security bots. Unlike the ones on Felicity they were heavily armored, and had guns along with the stunners and capture web launchers. I was getting a bad feeling about this.

  The hatch opened with a cool swishing noise when we reached it. Naoko led me through, into a big room full of strange things. Cabinets, and shelves full of odd knickknacks. Pictures of strange-looking people, and interesting places. A big desk that looked like it was made of spaceship armor, with a bunch of holographic data windows floating in the air above it.

  But it was the man behind the desk that I needed to focus on. He was big. Even bigger than the tall spacer women I’d seen in the port, and broader too. His arms were almost as big around as my waist, and he looked like he could snap me in half without any effort at all. He wasn’t happy, either.

  His face was so odd. There was hair growing from his chin, a forest of dark brown that hid a third of his face. The hair on his head was cut short, and there were deep lines around his eyes. The whole effect was more intimidating than Matron Gisel at her worst, and he hadn’t even said anything yet.

  “Naoko, good. Maybe you can explain to me what you think you’ve been doing for the last few hours?”
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  “I was simply completing my mission, Captain,” Naoko replied. “It seems that there are no vendors who sell the plants in question, so I was forced to acquire local assistance in obtaining them.”

  His eyes narrowed. “You aren’t rated for wilderness activity, Naoko.”

  “No, sir. Nevertheless, Alice and I were able to complete the acquisition. If you’ll allow it, I’d like to offer her half my share in payment for her efforts.”

  “I see. Were you aware of her legal status, Naoko?”

  “You mean, that she is a refugee from a mind control tyranny traveling in search of asylum? Yes, Captain, the matter did come up. I was under the impression that you favor offering assistance in such cases.”

  “I do. That doesn’t explain why you felt the need to sneak her on board without informing me,” he scowled.

  “I thought it would be best to ensure that any blame would fall on myself, sir,” Naoko said weakly.

  “Oh, so you thought I should hear about this from the portmaster first?”

  Naoko winced. “I’m sorry, Captain. I didn’t expect to end up in a confrontation with the local constables.”

  “Always expect trouble to find you, Naoko. And you!” He suddenly turned to stab an accusing finger at me. “What possessed you to lead an urban environment android outside the port?”

  I found myself standing up straight. “Sir, I didn’t know she’d have a problem with it, sir. She seemed really amazing when we were dealing with the inugami, sir.”

  He blinked. “Inugami? What kind of trouble did you get into, Naoko?”

  She hung her head. “There was a team waiting for me in the port, and they had my compliance codes. They would have gotten me, if Alice hadn’t come along and helped.”

  He gave me another look. “You got into a fight with an inugami snatch team and won? What exactly are you, Alice?”

  “Sir, no one at the orphanage could ever figure that out, sir. But I didn’t really fight the inugami, sir. They were using a jammer to keep Naoko from calling for help, so I just grabbed it and broke it. Sir.”