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Two
Everyone at the Wonderland Academy for Girls learned two things: Manners and murder. The first one was for appearances’ sake. The latter was for livelihood. For Wonderland turned out the greatest assassins in the Imperium, highly prized for their ability to blend in unnoticed until it was too late for their victims. For an orphan girl like Alice, born out among the cold and methane ice of the Trans Neptunian Outposts, it was the best she could hope for. Good work, if you could get it. So she applied herself, and after years of intensive study, she became one of Miss Cheshire’s favorite students. Not that the bitch would ever let Alice know that.
“Stand up straight,” Miss Cheshire barked, striking out with her discipline stick, as she called it. The thick sliver of synthetic bamboo, lashed Alice across her right knuckles as she stood before her instructor. Alice shook her hand and stared straight ahead. Even after years it still hurt, though not as badly as it had when she was dropped off at Wonderland’s door at the age of five.
“I swear, Alice, just when I think you could almost pass for a cultivated lady, you go and disappoint.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Cheshire.” As with most occasions, the only response Miss Cheshire would accept from the girls under her tutelage was “Yes, Miss Cheshire,” and “I’m sorry, Miss Cheshire.” And she got really tired of the latter. Today was one of those days.
She sighed, rolling her green eyes and giving a disapproving flick of her long, fluffy tail. Alice watched the tail bob and sway as Miss Cheshire turned and walked past the line of girls toward the front of the instruction room. Every year some new girl invariably tried to grab that tail. And every time Miss Cheshire put that girl in the infirmary for at least a standard week. But today was almost Graduation Day, and she appeared to be in a good mood. She had even changed colors for the occasion, choosing a soft magenta for her thick fur.
“Now, girls. You have too more trials ahead of you. One right here at Wonderland, and the last in the field. If you survive the first.”
Alice smiled. She knew she would survive, and she was ready to get out of here. She was eager to make her own way in the world, and she hated Wonderland with the passion of a supernova.
She sent everyone off to separate rooms where simulated trials awaited them, each keyed to a personal weakness of the girl. Alice wondered what lay behind her door, as she had worked hard to overcome any and all of her weaknesses. When the chime sounded, each door slid open, and each girl stepped inside.
Bright lights and the smell of accelerant and burning flesh greeted Alice as she stepped inside, the door sealing and disappearing. Barring a hull breach of the Wonderland facility, it wouldn’t not reopen until the test was concluded, so Alice surged forward, looking around quickly to get her bearings.
She had to do a quick sitrep to figure out what was going on and what her objection was. The place looked like a war zone, so an assassination of an important planetary potentate or other functionary was probably out. Which meant an extraction? Maybe. She’d play it by ear and improvise. A metal hornet drone hovered into range, lobbing a glob of explosive mana in her direction. The accelerant jelly, whose street name was Greek fire,” struck a plinth behind her and exploded, sending oily flames shooting in every direction. Alice rolled toward an armored corpse and grabbed its service weapon, a Borogove Lancer. She hefted it and fired. Nothing.
“Shit!”
In her haste, Alice had forgotten that Borogoves only fired for their owners. She dodged another dollop of fire jelly as she dove into a blast pit and brought out her multitool opening the weapon’s control panel and reordering the fiber optic connections with practiced speed. She felt the hornet buzz closer, turning and aiming up and under the beast to deliver a fatal shot center mass, a spike of coruscating energy stabbing it. Alice climbed from the pit and rolled once more as molten metal rained down into the pit she had occupied seconds before.
Alice got up and broke into a run, heading for a set of ruins half a click east in the direction the hornet had come from. Whatever her objective was—besides staying alive—she would find it there.
Alice leapt over the slagged remains of a plasticrete barrier, her eyes scanning the entire spectrum for traps. All it would take was one monofilament anti-personnel wire, and she’d be crawling out of the simulation dragging a pair of bloody stumps that used to be legs. She wondered what happened to Wonderland students who were only maimed. She had never heard of any. She wondered idly what Miss Cheshire would think as she bled out on the floor. She’d probably shake her head, make a tsk tsk sound, and give a disapproving flick of her tail before saying something sarcastic.
But there were no such defenses, at least as far as she could discern. She had long suspected that even the toughest simulations wouldn’t be that difficult. If you listened to your training, practiced every day, and remembered yourself, she felt, you would survive. Wonderland hadn’t made a name for itself by killing off even a third of its students. At least, that’s what Alice told herself in the quiet moments between terrors. She was never certain she believed it. Sometimes it felt exactly like they were trying to kill her, and this was one of those times.
Sensing movement off to her right, Alice aimed her pilfered lancer in that direction. A slate gray security golem revealed itself, moving around a blasted plinth and staring at her with crimson eyes before lunging toward her. The big golem wasn’t armed, but as big and heavily armored as it was, it didn’t need to be.
Alice fired, striking it in the left shoulder. The beam left a small black hole in the outer layer of nanocarbon plate, nothing more.
The gray behemoth moved toward her with the speed of a Poulson Skyrider. She barely had time to duck and roll out of the way before the golem could snatch her up and snap her in half. She fired again, this time at its enormous, brick-shaped feet, before getting up and running deeper into the ruins, the golem right behind her.
More ruined structures revealed themselves through the smoke. Alice found herself running through what appeared to have been a spaceport that had been flash-bombed from a high altitude. The hornet drone she destroyed, and the golem she was currently fleeing, were part of a squad sent in to mop up any survivors. They were certainly thorough. Alice saw several burned and broken bodies amid the rubble.
Get it together, girl, she told herself. This isn’t a sight-seeing trip. The golem was almost directly on top of her. In another moment it would have her. Alice wondered if the simulation would stop running before or after it pulled her apart.
“Think!” she said through gritted teeth. How do you kill a golem? Her mind raced. She couldn’t use a direct assault. Or stealth. Nothing from her assassin’s playbook would be effective against something that could withstand a carpet bomb. If she had an M-whip she could flay it pretty handily, but they went in weaponless for the final exam. Then she remembered.
The golem chased her through a set of pillars that had once held up a great building. She slung the rifle over her shoulder and ran faster, trying to put as much distance between her and it while she thought about how she was going to do what she needed to do. Even with her enhancements it was difficult.
Then she saw it just around the curve of what was left of the decimated structure. Putting on a final burst of speed, Alice leaped and grabbed at a crosspiece of rebar and swung up and over it, grabbing hold of the crumbled masonry at the top of the ruined pillar. It was dark, and with her stealth suit she blended in, hopefully even against the golem’s enhanced senses.
As the titan ran by underneath her, unaware of where she was, Alice took quick aim at the back of its head, turned the gain up to full, and fired, melting its skull plate to slag. She then jumped from the top of the pillar and landed squarely on the thing’s back, dropping her rifle as she did so. With a grunt she stuck her fist into the golem’s head and grabbed at the wet, fibrous innards, making sure to get a good grip before yanking them out as hard as she could.
The golem froze, spasming for a moment before crashing face-first to the rubble-strewn ground. Alice rolled away over the top of its head seconds before impact, coming up with a handful of slimy golem brains. She tossed the whole mess to the ground and wiped her hand across the nanocarbon mesh on her hip. “I hate golems,” she muttered.
Could that have been the test? She hoped so, but she waited several seconds for the simulation to fade away to no avail. No. This was not the point of the test. There was still something else she had to do. Picking up her lancer, she ran deeper into the ruins.
A voice cried out to her from the rubble. Alice looked down and to her right, spying a claw-like hand covered in blood, reaching for her.
Alice was unsure of what to do next? Was she expected to rescue survivors? She was trained to be an assassin, not a field medic. She went to him. He was a black man in Confederation grays. His uniform was streaked with soot and blood. He looked at her, grimacing. “Help. Me.”
Alice looked around, still unsure of herself. She had expected a standard kill mission, not this. “O-OK. Hang on.”
The soldier was pinned under a girder. With her enhanced strength, she should be able to lift it, assuming the physics of the simulation weren’t dialed up beyond reason. She knelt and jammed her gloved fingers under it, lifting it with a grunt and tossing it to the side.
“Thanks,” the man muttered. “I’m Staff Sergeant Jenkins.”
Alice nodded. “That’s nice.” She didn’t want to get to know this guy. He was a simulation, for the Oligarch’s sake.
“You must be from the 405. Enhanced squad.”
“Uh, sure,” said Alice. “Hey, wanna get out of here?”
“Most definitely.”
“Can you walk?”
“I don’t know. We’ll see.”
Alice helped the man to her feet, but as soon as he put weight on his left leg he staggered, almost falling over. Alice had to support his weight.
“I guess that’s a negative,” said Staff Sergeant Jenkins.
“That’s all right. I can help you. Let’s move.”
But where? Alice wondered. There wasn’t a safe zone or an evac point. Why didn’t the simulation just freaking end already? Wasn’t her test over?
A blue-steel colored Cobalt Series golem appeared over a low rise, answering Alice’s question. It took careful aim at Staff Sergeant Jenkins and fired, its slug-thrower getting him five times in the chest. He spasmed and died, spurting simulated blood from his simulated mouth as he toppled face first onto broken chunks of plasticrete.
Alice hefted her lancer and lazed the golem’s head. It wasn’t as heavily armored as its counterpart, heating to a hundred thousand degrees Kelvin in a couple of seconds, popping like a zit. Its body fell in a lifeless heap.
But there were others, regular men using the golem for cover. They had the drop on her. They fired, slug-throwers piercing her armor. She felt herself being eviscerated. She couldn’t really die in the simulation, of course, but it felt like she was being killed. The haptic relays in her suit were dialed up high enough to cause bruising from the simulated projectiles. Alice decided in that moment that this was as close to painful death as she ever wanted to get.
Slowly, the men melted, along with the ruined spaceport and the corpse of Staff Sergeant Jenkins. The gruesome scene was replaced with the stark white tiles of the simulation room. Alice winced as she flexed her left arm, still stinging from the make-believe bullet that had pretended to tear through her biceps.
Miss Cheshire was walking toward her, a grin on her face that could either mean she passed with flying colors or failed miserably. Alice felt certain it was the latter.
“Very well done, Alice.”
“But I was killed, Ma’am. The person I attempted to rescue also died.”
“That was the objective of the exercise,” said Miss Cheshire.
“I don’t understand.”
Miss Cheshire placed a paw on Alice’s shoulder. She tried not to flinch away from her touch as her instructor led her from the simulation room.
“Every test is keyed to the specific weaknesses of each student.”
“Yes, Ma’am. I know.”
“Your weakness is that you always need to win. But life just doesn’t work that way. You will have failed missions. People you care about will die.”
Alice looked at her as they crossed the threshold of the simulation room. “You taught us that caring for people is a weakness.”
“No,” said Miss Cheshire. “I taught you that sentimentality is a weakness and could get you killed. I am not naive enough to think that you will never care about another living soul. Loss is a part of life, but you can’t avoid emotional attachments to others just to keep from being hurt by them. It isn’t healthy.”
Miss Cheshire left Alice alone to ponder her words.
