“No! I, I don’t want to hurt people, Naoko. I just, I can’t let anything happen to my friends.”
She gave me a gentle smile. “Thank you, Alice. That fierce protectiveness is a common thing among warrior breeds, and I appreciate your care. Just remember that it can lead you to excess if you aren’t careful. If you ever do find yourself in a situation like that I advise you to keep control of your anger, and don’t let it drive you to do things you’ll regret. But that was not my main point. Alice, do you think you will be less attached to your first boyfriend?”
Oh. Oh, my.
“Probably not,” I reluctantly admitted. “If sex is really as big a deal as the vidshows make it seem-”
“I suspect that your experiences will make romance vids look tame in comparison,” she interrupted. “People have been enhancing that aspect of their lives since the earliest days of medical technology, and we’ve already seen a tendency towards extreme sensory mods in your design. Combine that with the close attachment to your friends, and I’d advise you to be very careful about who you open your heart to. You could find yourself swept away all too easily.”
“I’m not sure if that sounds terrifying or awesome,” I told her.
“Perhaps both?” She suggested.
“Maybe so. Um, alright, I see what you’re getting at. The way I am, maybe I could get taken advantage of if I’m not careful. But how would Akio know any of this?”
“It’s hardly a mystery, Alice. No one gives out extreme supersoldier packages without taking steps to ensure they aren’t misused. An enhanced loyalty to your own tribe is the least of the possibilities. I still fear that there is likely to be a control mechanism hidden somewhere in your design, although the captain disagrees.”
“What does he think?”
She sighed. “He thinks your abilities are due to a more general transhumanism project, rather than a specialized spy or soldier program. In that case you might simply have ‘improved’ social instincts of some sort, rather than something intended to control you. But considering how normal humans react to that sort of thing, I rather hope that he’s wrong.”
I hung my head. “What if he isn’t?”
Naoko put her hands on my shoulders, and searched my face for a long moment. She seemed saddened by what she found there.
“Then I shall help you hide it for as long as you can, my friend,” she finally said.
My sigh of relief was probably more revealing than was wise, but I didn’t care. I hugged her.
“Thank you, Naoko.”
“Any time, Alice. You know, you are not the only one in the room with enhanced social bonding instincts. No matter what happens, I shall always be on your side.”
Hearing her say that made me feel a little better about my personal problems, but it didn’t change our immediate situation. When the invitation to the planning meeting arrived it was a welcome distraction.
The captain and I took the Speedy Exit over to the yakuza frigate, with Emla and Chief West providing their usual escort services. We docked at a mooring point on the outside of the ship instead of landing in a hanger, and I wondered whose idea that was. Did the captain want to be able to detach and flee in a hurry, or were they trying to make sure we didn’t smuggle any nukes on board? Not that a nuke in the hangar bay would destroy a ship this size, but I’m sure it would be a hassle.
Akio had sent a squad of his own inugami to escort us to the conference room, and the greeting he gave me was warm enough to border on improper. Against my better judgment, I felt the knot of tension in my belly ease a little. I couldn’t be too friendly in return, though, because there were a lot of people in the room. Lord Yamashida and some of his flunkies, the captains of the salvage ships, a couple of marine officers, and a whole bunch of managers from the shipyard workers.
Looking around the room, it struck me that out of all the Masu-kai minions the only men were the captains of the two salvage ships. All the rest, from the yard dogs to the marines, were women. Mostly canine morphs, and it seemed to me that the further their position would put them from direct contact with their masters the less human they looked.
A social engineer could probably figure out a lot about Masu-kai society from that. I wasn’t too sure about the subtler implications. Was it some kind of human supremacist message, or just a convenient way to make an android’s social status obvious at a glance?
“I believe you said something about a map of the wreck, Captain Sokol?” Akio opened the meeting.
The captain nodded, and pulled up an image on the holoprojector.
“Yes, although I recommend against relying on it too heavily,” he said. “The external images are from the Square Deal’s sensors, but our expeditions into the interior have mapped only a tiny fraction of the ship. Given the difficulty of getting any kind of sensor reading through the ship’s armored bulkheads, much of this remains conjecture.”
Gaia, but this ship was huge. I knew battleships were big, especially in the Inner Sphere, but there’s a difference between reading about something and seeing it. I ate a copy of the raw data so I could visualize the scale properly, and took a moment to marvel at it.
Before her final battle the Emperor’s Hope must have been twenty thousand meters long. Her general layout was similar to the frigate we were on, although she was a lot bulkier. Nearly five thousand meters across the beam, and forty-three hundred meters from top to bottom. Instead of mass drivers, her gigantic turrets had held beam directors for graser cannons that could probably cut a frigate in half from ten million kloms away.
Hundreds of smaller turrets had mounted an assortment of mass drivers and lighter grasers, all carefully arranged so they wouldn’t block the firing arcs of the main guns. Long trenches in the armored hull sheltered thousands of point defense lasers, not little UV lasers like the Square Deal carried but big x-lasers with enough firepower to pick off attack craft as well as missiles. The armored belts along the ship’s flanks had been more than a hundred meters thick, and the cavernous hangars behind that armor had held thirty billion cubic meters of drones and battle riders.