At the third door, Dabeet didn’t enter any code. He just palmed the barracks door.
Nothing happened.
He palmed it again. It opened.
At the next door he learned that double-palming worked as well as the code. There was no security here at all.
Was it because these barracks were unused? Or would the same procedure open the occupied barracks on the next two levels down?
He thought of going back to tell the others, but then he thought of something else.
Why would an adult teacher, an officer, be wandering an unused corridor looking for a student? Why would he be asking other students where Timeon had gone? Wasn’t the station system tracking all the children by chips in their uniforms?
Dabeet had been thinking that the reason he hadn’t been caught exploring was because Roboto Smirnova hadn’t turned his chip back on after their foray to the door, and it was dumb luck that nobody had tried, and failed, to locate Dabeet on the tracking system. But he had been worried that the more he went around with Monkey into places where they didn’t belong, the likelier it would be that her chip would give the game away.
But no. Gusti had to look for Timeon because there were no tracking chips. There was no security system. Doors could be opened by anyone, kids could go wherever they wanted, because the adults in this place didn’t care where the kids went or what they did. At least not enough to encumber themselves with an elaborate system of codes and IDs in order to open doors.
It sounded so careless to Dabeet that he was sure there must be another explanation. But what could that be? They shut down student-tracking because some rats had swallowed a lot of chips and they were now flooding the system with false locations? The system was being updated and rebooted so the lack of tracking was only temporary?
Stupidity and carelessness sounded more plausible to him.
Was it possible that airlock doors were just as easy to open? Had security become that lax in the station?
Then, a more chilling thought: Was the security system turned off so that the raiders could open any door by double-palming it? Could they possibly be on their way already? Could Dabeet’s “assignment” be a smoke screen, to lull him into a false sense of security about how long he had before they arrived?
But if they wanted their arrival time to be a surprise, why tell Dabeet anything at all? If the security system was this disabled, why did they need Dabeet to open anything for them? What was the point of involving Dabeet if their inside people in the station were this effective?
No. Likeliest reason for the lax security was the normal one: laziness. Close runner-up: incompetence. Third place: stupidity. These were always the likeliest explanations for procedural lapses. Constant vigilance might be essential to keep a system safe, but constant vigilance was also unbearably tedious, and it was easy to talk yourself into reasons why it wasn’t all that important.
Battle School had held the brightest minds of Earth and trained them to save the human race. Security made sense because important things were happening here.
But Fleet School was only training spacer kids to go off and explore distant planets. These kids weren’t being trained to kill, they were trained to collect plant specimens and read scientific instruments. So … palm-palm, and anybody can open any door. Security consists of not telling the students.
And, amazingly enough, it had worked till now.
Or it hadn’t, but Dabeet wasn’t an insider so nobody had told him.
If I go back and tell them now, they’ll look at me like I’m an idiot because they already know and it never occurred to them that I didn’t know. Like Monkey with the closet doors.
But if you could open the doors to other teams’ barracks, there was no chance that nobody would have used it to commit pranks. We’re children here, thought Dabeet. Some temptations are irresistible.
Dabeet headed briskly back toward the barracks where the meeting was going on. If he ran into Gusti coming back the other way, he’d claim he was now trying to walk off his homesickness. Vigorous exercise, that’s the ticket!
He didn’t encounter Gusti.
He double-palmed the door to the supposed Dragon Army barracks. The others stopped talking and looked at him—clearly they had been expecting an adult when the door suddenly opened.
“Something I think you should know,” said Dabeet. He told them about double-palming, and how Monkey’s code worked on other doors. “Maybe it’s only on this level,” said Dabeet. “Maybe not. Maybe all the teachers know about this, maybe not. Did any of you know that double-palming would open any barracks door?”
“Maybe it’s your magical palms,” said Zhang He, already walking to the door. He went outside. The door closed. A moment later, it opened again. “Toguro,” said Zhang He.
“If we have a bunch of people chasing us,” said Monkey, “it might be useful to know we can open any door.”
“Unless they also know it,” said Zhang He.
Then Dabeet told them about Gusti looking for Teburoro Timeon. “They’re not tracking us,” he said. “Whatever Gusti wants with you, Tim, it must be urgent enough that he forgot that he’s not supposed to drop clues that the teachers don’t always know the location of every student.”
“Maybe the system’s down for a few hours,” said Ignazio.
“Maybe,” said Monkey. “But Dabeet and I were gone for more than an hour yesterday and nobody challenged us about it. Nobody came looking for us, nobody said, ‘What were you two kids doing in the service corridors.’”
“That doesn’t prove anything,” said Ragnar.
“You’re right,” said Monkey. “So let’s get some real evidence by asking about it. Then the adults will know that they have to reinstitute the security and tracking systems.”
“I was afraid that if I went exploring,” said Dabeet, “I mean really deep exploring, I’d have to do it without any of my clothes, because supposedly they’re all equipped with a tracking device.”
“Talk about getting caught with your pants down,” said Ragnar.
“It’s a good thing if we can go anywhere,” said Zhang He, “and the bad guys don’t know how to open doors we close behind us. But we can’t know what they know until they get here.”
“If they get here,” said Ragnar.
“Obviously,” said Monkey.
“Sorry I interrupted the meeting,” said Dabeet. “I thought you might have already known this, but if you didn’t, then you needed to.” He turned and left. Nobody called for him to come back.
Dabeet opened the first closet again, and this time nobody came along to prevent him from using the door. Inside the service corridor he was careful to use Monkey’s method of marking his trail, since this was a different level. And the first time he came to one of the outside doors that they had speculated might provide access between levels, he reached out to palm it open.
Access between levels—but inside or outside the closed atmosphere system?
He went back to the nearest closet door and put on a child-sized atmo suit. Then he went back to the outside door. If the suit sensed a drop in pressure, it would automatically attach him to the nearest exterior wall and activate the breathing system. It would also set off a distress call—unless some lazy moron had also disabled that safety feature.
But getting caught outside in an atmo suit wouldn’t necessarily be a disaster, because Dabeet was already regarded as a pathetic loser. “I just wanted to get some experience in space because they didn’t train me before,” he could say. “All these other kids knew what they were doing when they got here. How am I supposed to catch up?” Yes, he could sell the idea that he was just a needy stupid kid doing loser stuff in the effort not to be such a loser.
The door did not lead into cold space. It opened on a narrow vertical passage which, unlike the upshaft and downshaft you could enter from the main corridor, relied on ladders with no gravity assist.
Ladders weren’t easy in an atmo suit. Dabeet thought o
f taking the thing off as soon as he got to the next level up, but then he realized that his pathetic-loser story was also true. He really did need to get experience doing tasks while wearing an atmo suit. He would never be as adroit and agile as the kids who had grown up in spaceships and space stations—but now he understood that he didn’t have to be the best at space stuff, or even good at it. He only had to be able to perform adequately enough to stay alive in dangerous situations.
He walked around the next level up—marking, again, how far he’d gone each time he passed a shelf unit. But this time he saw that there were different chemicals stored on each shelf unit, and some different tools, too. This made him curious enough to try going out into the main corridor, where he found that he was definitely not on a student barracks level.
Dabeet wanted to test to see if the doors here—which came about three or four times more frequently than barracks doors—responded to the same simple double-palm code. But what if these were teacher sleeping quarters? Those were supposedly on the level below the kitchens, mess halls, gyms, and classrooms, but common knowledge wasn’t always right. He was beginning to wonder whether it was ever right.
And teachers’ sleeping quarters weren’t the only possible uses for these rooms. They could be offices or conference rooms, and if he palmed open a door he might find himself facing six adults having an earnest meeting about what they imagined Monkey and Dabeet had been doing yesterday in the service corridors.
Then again, they might be storage rooms, and one of them might be filled with useful laser weapons. Or maybe they were filled with uniforms from long-defunct student armies from Battle School days, and extra flash suits from the time when twice as many kids needed them constantly for practice and competition.
Or something really crazy, like the frozen corpses of Formics that died at the end of the war and were being saved up for later study.
That was stupid. After the first and second wars, no Formics ever got this close to Earth, and so there’d be no reason at all to transport the corpses here.
Except that Lagrange stations were convenient depots, near to Earth and the Moon but not in orbit. That’s why smugglers were using it, right?
What if these rooms were being used by the smugglers?
Very inconvenient location for warehousing, thought Dabeet. But then, the parcels that he and Zhang had seen were small. The big stuff stayed in the warehouses in the docking area, and the small secret stuff was stowed up here.
He listened at a door and heard nothing. That meant either excellent sound isolation or the room had no conversation going on.
He double-palmed it. It slid open just like a barracks door. A light came on, just as in a barracks. Shelves lined the back wall—deep shelves, deeper than a single row of bunks. And some of them—but not all—were laden with metal crates and trunks.
Each one was tagged with the name of an officer.
This was where they stowed their possessions—whatever they didn’t need in daily life in Fleet School. If somebody wanted to hide something dangerous, it might be here—but then, smugglers would hardly put their contraband in trunks labeled with their own names.
There weren’t enough staff and faculty here to account for all the rooms on this level. So Dabeet stepped out and closed the door.
Keep exploring here, or go back into the service corridor?
He opted for the service corridor. Exploring all these rooms would be a job for the whole team, if they decided it was worth it. Maybe there were weapons on this level, maybe not. But they needed to get a map of what rooms contained what kind of stuff. It was too big a job for Dabeet alone. What he wanted was not a specific inventory, but rather a general map of the station.
So he went back to the outside laddershaft he had come through and went up one more level.
This time the ladder tilted sharply inward, so it wasn’t really a ladder anymore. More like a stairway with very narrow treads. And when he got to the top, it wasn’t a full standing-height door. Dabeet opened it, and found himself in a completely different kind of corridor.
This must be the top level, where the wheel of the Fleet School station narrowed. There was no room for a public corridor at all. And nothing was stored up here. Instead, ductwork, cables, and pipes lined both sides of the narrow corridor.
The floor consisted of sections about a meter long, with smooth, solid outer edges and open-weave centers, so Dabeet could see through the floor to the additional cables and pipes that ran below it. The solid edges bore the unmistakable marks of wheels; this was a kind of track, on which some kind of vehicle ran.
When Dabeet tried to stand, he found that he could—but anybody taller than him would be completely unable to do so. Even Dabeet had to move his head to one side or stoop over whenever he came to a light fixture.
The place wasn’t dim, though—if somebody needed to come up here to repair or replace something, they’d have plenty of light to see what they were doing.
Dabeet had to walk along the corridor for a while, just to see if there was any change. There was, of course. Since the level below this one had lots of rooms instead of a series of long barracks rooms parallel with the main corridor, there were ducts and wiring leading down into those spaces at appropriate intervals.
But at intervals that suggested the size of a barracks room, there were much thicker arrays of ductwork, cables, and pipes leading downward. These, Dabeet decided, must pass through a thicker-than-usual wall in the next level, in order to service the barracks rooms two, three, and four levels down.
A little mental calculation made it plain that these ducts couldn’t possibly provide atmo and heating for more than three levels, so beginning four levels down, a different duct-and-pipe system must service the lower levels. Maybe a corridor just like this one, only upside down, ran along under the lowest level, with ducts rising upward to the levels above. Or maybe there was an “empty” floor like this one in the middle somewhere.
Good to know this existed, because most of the kids in Fleet School could run along this corridor, while it would be nothing but trouble for adults. A reasonable escape route, especially because the floor curved even more steeply upward, restricting visibility more than on the lower levels.
Then he came to a place where something was attached to the ceiling, forcing him to get down on all fours to get past it. When he was under the thing, it took little time for him to realize that he was looking at the cart designed to run along the track—four wheels and some kind of propulsion system. No steering, though—just guide wheels mounted sideways, so that the cart was running along the sides as well as the base of the segmented floor.
Dabeet examined the floor sections again, and realized now that there was a flange running along the raised edges—except right here, where the cart was attached to the ceiling. If the cart was lowered straight down, it would settle right in between the edges, and the wheels would go right into their place. Once the cart moved forward or backward a meter, the side-wheels would be under the flange, so that in case there was a loss of gravity—or centrifugal force—the cart would not rise away from the floor.
This cart-and-track system must have been used before the station was set to spinning, so it was able to carry a tied-down cargo even in zero-gee.
Judging from the tracks, the cart must have seen a lot of use for a long time. But there was also dust on the floor, so … how long had it been since anybody used it?
Since Dabeet had no basis for estimating the normal rate of deposition of dust in this corridor, he had no way to estimate. But it was possible, wasn’t it, that this corridor had fallen out of use since Battle School made way for Fleet School?
Maybe these systems aren’t even used now, thought Dabeet. New and better systems were installed on another level—a more convenient one—and all this was left here because it wasn’t worth the effort to dismantle it. It’s not as if you can do anything else with this space.
He placed a hand against an air du
ct.
Warm.
So it was in use. And that meant it might fail, and so this access track might still be used from time to time.
Was Bean up here? Or did he do all his exploring inside the ducts, as Monkey seemed to believe?
Well, more fool he, to cram himself into such tiny spaces when he could have walked upright along here.
Only Dabeet wasn’t interested in walking. He had to see how the cart was supposed to be lowered, and whether it still worked.
Lowering it required nothing more than double-palming the control box beside the cart. Immediately four mechanical arms lowered the cart to the floor and then withdrew back into the ceiling.
The cart was in two identical parts. But a little pulling and pushing showed Dabeet that either end could be adapted into a passenger space. Unexpectedly, the rider or driver had to lie on his back and watch his forward progress in a couple of mirrors that popped up on either side. Dabeet crawled into the space, which was designed for a much larger body. For a moment he thought it might be like a car, using feet to control speed and braking—in which case his lack of adult height might make it impossible for him to use the thing.
But no, the controls were all in a single hard-wired appliance that he could hold while lying on his back. Actually, there were two remotes, one on either side, so that left-handed or right-, you could drive using your dominant hand.
Dabeet started pressing the buttons and yes, the cart moved easily and fairly rapidly along. He soon got used to the weird upside-down mirror image of the track ahead of him. And it wasn’t as if there were any obstacles ahead of him. It took very little time for him to complete a circuit of this level. There were four more suspended carts, for a total of five.
When he had the cart back under its hanging-place, Dabeet turned himself over and crawled off the cart. This was designed to carry two adults, at need—one in each half. But kids Dabeet’s size could double up and piggyback. Might be able to carry six or eight kids, depending on the power of the motor and, of course, the battery life.
Double-palming brought the arms back down to pick up the cart and draw it up to the ceiling.
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