Children of the Fleet

by Orson Scott Card

  Even after these tests, Dabeet could hardly bring himself to let go of the bar. He was trembling. But he did it, and without too much delay, either, because if the information he gathered was going to be worth something, he had to get it now.

  Can I still think of the hull of the station as “up”?

  No. That really was too much like a silverfish. He had to think of it as down, so that what he was doing was crawling along sloping ground, not clinging to a down-curving ceiling.

  With his mind properly oriented, he began creeping. He wasn’t quick—especially at the junctures between the wheels—but his steady movement got him there quickly enough. Only twenty-two minutes since he saw the docking vessel.

  Was that even possible? It felt like it took forever to run through the pass-through and get up to the top corridor. And twice as much of forever to get down the side of the wheel. Twenty-two minutes of forever.

  There was no nanooze on the dockbridge between station and ship. Nor were there handholds. He couldn’t exploit the physical connection between Fleet School and the Juke vessel, not without a serious risk of coming loose and drifting along to an unshielded reentry.

  I’d die of the heat long before I actually burst into flames. So, it could be worse.

  Of course, if I didn’t get sucked into Earth’s gravity well, there’d be more than fifteen hours of using up all the oxygen in this suit, singing old Spanish lullabies to myself and weeping for Mother as I drifted off into the cold black of space.

  Why didn’t these suits have directional rockets to allow a person to maneuver and save himself if he came loose?

  A quick scan of the heads-up display showed a little icon labeled DIR. He focused on it for one, two, three beats and the icon expanded into a menu.

  DIRECTIONALS

  GL BL D

  GR BR V

  He made it a point not to focus on any of these long enough to activate them. Decoding them wasn’t hard, especially because now he could remember hearing an explanation of the directionals in a lecture when everybody else was going outside. Glove Left, Glove Right, Boot Left, Boot Right, Dorsal, Ventral.

  No, no, no, no. His first attempt with directional rockets was not going to be all by himself out here. He didn’t even know what part of the glove and boot the rocket blast would come from.

  Yes he did. Sole of the boot just under the pad of the foot behind the toes. Middle finger of the glove but only when the finger was rigidly extended. And the rocket blast would be only the tiniest trickle so that any effects would be slight.

  He could almost hear Monkey saying it—though he knew she had never mentioned the directionals to him: One second of that tiny trickle will put your frozen corpse a hundred kilometers off your original trajectory within a minute, so search parties will never, never find you. Stay on your original trajectory.

  Monkey hadn’t said it. An instructor had said it. Odd Oddson had said it. But it sounded much more important and believable in Monkey’s voice.

  It was disconcerting how easily he could recast his memories. How often did such distortions happen inadvertently? If he couldn’t trust his memory …

  The nanooze won’t let me break free with two feet at a time. What do I have to do in order to simply jump this very, very short distance of maybe ten meters? That’s a short distance, isn’t it? Must I balance on one foot and then hope I can take off straight up and then catch myself on the Juke vessel’s nanooze?

  He migrated over to the nearest emergency airlock door on the hull of this wheel, and took hold of the bar there. Holding on with both hands, with both feet firmly planted in the nanooze, he pushed off very gently, both feet at the same time.

  They didn’t budge.

  Bacana. A safety feature that made his mission impossible.

  He tried again, harder. Was there a little give before his feet were sucked back down, hard against the hull?

  Now, instead of standing flat-footed, he flexed the boots enough that he was held only by the toe portion of the soles. He pushed off, a little harder than before, and …

  His legs shot out away from the hull.

  His gloves’ grip on the bar didn’t even bend. He swung out as if his hands were a hinge, and then his heels and buttocks slammed against the hull on the other side. The nanooze caught and gripped him.

  This is good. Stand on tiptoe and jump, and the nanooze on the Juke vessel will catch me.

  Probably.

  If I can aim well enough for any part of my body to touch any part of that ship.

  No time to waste. Dabeet crawled along the surface of the hull until he was positioned directly under—across from? over?—the widest part of the Juke vessel. It was not an atmospheric craft so there was no nonsense with wings or fins. Just a fine smooth surface with two visible emergency airlocks on it. Very tall from top to bottom of the ship. He could reach it. Especially if he didn’t have to use a lot of force to break free of the hull of the station.

  He tucked up his feet, one at a time, until they were under the trunk of his body. Then he let go of one hand and balanced himself on boots flat against the hull.

  It took ten seconds to persuade himself to push away with the other hand.

  It took a lot of strength to organize his body to stand upright instead of swaying and wavering. Then his suit understood what he was doing and suddenly it was as if he were in a pillar attached to the ground at a ninety-degree angle. No wavering. His body was pointed directly at the Juke vessel.

  Maybe I should have tried to jump so I’d land like a belly flop in a swimming pool.

  Maybe I could never push off accurately in that position. So I’m doing this. Now.

  No he wasn’t. The nanooze wouldn’t let go of his flat feet at the same time.

  He rose to his toes. But the suit maintained his balance perfectly. All he had to do was try to stay in that position, and the suit, reading the tiny adjustments in his muscles, did the rest. Whoever designed this suit, thank you. And whoever died so that they would know these refinements were necessary, I honor your memory, because maybe I’ll live through this because of you.

  He pushed off gently. As if he only meant to jump a couple of centimeters from the ground.

  The nanooze let go. He drifted upward. He tilted his helmet back to see where he was going. Just like swimming. Just like diving. He wasn’t going up anymore, he was falling down toward the ship. Straight toward the ship.

  He splayed out his gloves to make maximum contact with the nanooze. Then landed. They stuck.

  I just freefell ten meters through space from one vessel to another. To the kids who were adept at maneuvers in the battleroom, this would have seemed like nothing. They made this jump from walls to stars in the battleroom all the time, and longer jumps, too, while shooting weapons. But for me this was, this is, unbelievably good luck.

  Sorry for breaking your rules, Monkey. If I did break them. I mean, I didn’t walk, I didn’t run. But I kind of did let go of one handhold before …

  I’m alive. That’s a passing grade even if I broke some rules.

  There were no friendly corner gaps on the Juke vessel, either, and the nanooze didn’t feel as if it was holding him as tightly. But by moving carefully, he had no trouble making his way to the aft airlock, farthest from the dockbridge. He had no idea what alarms would go off inside the ship, but if he was arrested or killed the moment he opened the door, at least he tried to do something useful. It might turn out to be incredibly stupid, but he didn’t leave it all up to the others to clean up his mess. And it was possible, wasn’t it, that with him in custody the others might be safer, right?

  The airlock worked more quickly than the clunky old design of the station airlocks. Zip, in. Zip, door closed. Whoosh, atmo recharged. Zip, inner door open. He didn’t have to push a single button or any other kind of control once he had called for the outside door to open. An excellent design, since a person in serious trouble in space might not be able to push a sequence of buttons. Just p
ush the one button, and the airlock itself would do the rest.

  And here he was inside the enemy ship, wearing a spacesuit. The display told him he could breathe without the suit, so he took off the helmet and set it near the airlock. He took two steps and then climbed out of the suit. He was too clumsy while wearing it to handle this reconnaissance as rapidly and thoroughly as he needed to. Wearing it wouldn’t save him a moment of time if he had to run away, because a butterfly could catch him while he suit-lurched his way back to the airlock.

  To his surprise, the suit and helmet interfaced with the recharge connections beside the airlock. A standardized interface that they hadn’t messed with in half a century or more. Very nice.

  There seemed to be nobody in this area, which looked to be a cargo bay. Like the cargo bay he and Zhang had inspected together months ago, helping with the tally. When they first discovered evidence that somebody was smuggling contraband through Fleet School.

  The trunks were large, about as big around and half the length of a coffin. Could they be loaded with weapons? Dabeet had no idea. They didn’t look long enough for rifles or automatic weapons, but who would bring projectile weapons into space?

  They were all firmly lashed to the shelves and frames. And because the boxes clung to the shelves, Dabeet realized: The ship was fully equipped with gravitics. There was no hint of freefall inside this space.

  Dabeet climbed onto a shelf and slid between boxes to the back wall. What did he expect to find? Maybe he only did it because it was behind big cargo containers that he found the small packages that turned out to be contraband. This time he found no secret parcels. Instead he saw that every single box had wires coming out of the end nearest the wall, and all those wires were bundled together, running the length of the cargo bay, getting thicker and thicker as they neared the front.

  What was this, a burglar alarm system?

  Dabeet made his way toward the front. From the central corridor, if you looked between the boxes you couldn’t see the wires. They were the same color as the walls, and the shadows were too dense behind and between the boxes.

  At the front, though, because he knew what to look for, he could see that the bundles of wires ran to a single box that looked just like the other boxes except it was not attached, electrically, to the ship in any way.

  Whatever those wires did, they were not part of the ship. It was quite possible that they were not under the ship’s control at all. Possible that the captain or pilot or whoever had no idea that the cargo was wired together.

  If I try to open one of these boxes, will it detonate a little explosive or poison dart or something to kill me?

  Let’s find out.

  No detonation. No dart. And also no opening a box, because there was a digital pad that needed either a passcode or a fingerprint, or both.

  His fingerprint would be useless, but he could try a few passwords, the kind that lazy stupid people used—and also the kind that lazy smart arrogant people used because they thought that stupider people wouldn’t guess them. One of them worked. BIRTHPLACE. Too lazy and stupid to type in “London” or “Boise” or “Caracas.” Any city would be better than just typing in the prompt.

  The lid was heavy and it couldn’t rise very far because of the shelf above it. If Dabeet were a grown man he might have tried to wrestle the box far enough out to open it completely, but that would probably pull the wires too far. So he’d just have to try to see.…

  Where light came into the box, near the end facing the central corridor, he could see a bunch of regular rectangles, slightly rounded at the corners, completely filling the space. Each one had what looked like a tiny dart stuck into it with a wire coming out. The wires all headed toward the back end of the box—no doubt, these were the wires attached to the box in front.

  Dabeet saw the letters V-A-C in a wedge of light and knew that these were all nice little packets of Vacoplaz, a very high explosive that worked with or without atmo. Dabeet had heard that space miners called it “wreck-roid,” or “ass-pop” for “asteroid popper,” because it could be used to blow the center of asteroids to dust. And each packet was equipped with a detonator connected to a central control, so they could all be made to explode at once.

  With his view of the contents already memorized, Dabeet lowered the lid, whereupon it relocked automatically. He was thinking: These are not meant to be carried inside the station, to be used to blow up selected locations. You don’t wire them together anywhere but the place where they’re meant to be used.

  If each box contains explosives all the way to the bottom, and all of them blow at once, not only will this ship be turned to small metal and plastic fragments, but also the resulting blast will breach the integrity of every structure in the station. All the wheels, all four battlerooms, the embarcation hub, everything.

  Do the raiders understand what they’re carrying here? Do they know that this ship will never take them home?

  If the purpose is to destroy the station, the ship, and all their contents, human and otherwise, why hasn’t it already taken place?

  Because whoever set this up doesn’t want to just blast it all to bits. They want an alarm to be sent out by the teachers, calling on the IF to send ships to rescue them. Maybe they’re hoping to blow up the first wave of rescue ships along with the station. Of course they are.

  And the explosives aren’t under the control of the raiders who came aboard the ship. That control box at the front is expecting to get the detonation signal from somewhere else.

  Is there anybody on this ship? If I leave the cargo bay and go to the front and …

  No, that’s the wrong thing to worry about. What if the person at the detonator controls is only waiting for the station to rotate enough to see that the docking is complete? I don’t have time to put on the suit, go back out the airlock, fly back to the station, get inside an airlock there, and then find somebody to help me figure out what to do. I got here fast, but not fast enough.

  So Dabeet simply palmed the door leading from the cargo bay to the passenger cabin. It opened easily—no reason for security there unless they were being attacked by pirates—and Dabeet was relieved to see that all the rows of seats were empty. There were twelve pairs of seats on either side of a central corridor, wide and comfortable seats as befitted a corporate vessel. Forty-eight passengers.

  Dabeet strode up the corridor to the door leading to the control room, the bridge, whatever they called it in their attempt to maintain outmoded nautical terminology. Again, the door palmed open. Again, there was nobody inside.

  That had to be a strict order from whoever held the detonation button. If somebody stayed on board, they might decide to check the cargo. They might find—would easily find—what Dabeet had seen, and reach the same conclusions. The central control box was bound to be booby-trapped, but there were no traps on the bricks of Vacoplaz. Half a dozen men could open every box and pull every detonator in what, half an hour? Maybe fifteen minutes. Better to tell them to clear the ship completely because … because …

  Because we’re sending another ship to pick you up from the main embarcation hub. You and all the children. Just gather the children in the hub and a much larger passenger ship will arrive within minutes of your signal.

  That would be a good lie. Dabeet hoped it was the lie they had been told. Because that would mean that any delaying action from the students might delay the moment of detonation.

  Might delay it long enough to …

  Dabeet was pleased to see that the main airlock stood open to the ship’s interior; only the outer door, the space door, was closed. And, like any good airlock, it responded to anybody pushing the button. The door whooshed open. The atmo of the ship and of the station had already equalized. There was no puff of air in either direction. And the door was unguarded. For the moment, at least.

  They really don’t think the students on this station pose any threat. And why should they? This wasn’t Battle School anymore. It was more like Eton th
an Sandhurst. More Phillips Exeter than West Point. And with the training officers gone, there weren’t any real military personnel. Just teachers, cooks, and children. They would be easy to round up, but there were so many it would take all their people to do it.

  Dabeet reclosed the outer airlock door and ran through the open airlock at the station end of the dockbridge. Now there would really be a danger of running into some of the enemy as they patrolled the corridors in search of stray students.

  Or not. Because, after all, this was the unfinished, never-occupied portion of the station. No students would be in class here, no teachers walking the halls. No doubt they had posted guards at the pass-through, to keep anybody from the finished station from trying to escape to the unfinished area. But they wouldn’t have guards in the upper, maintenance corridor that Monkey and Dabeet knew ran along the top of the pass-through structure, or the lower one, either. His friends could get to the rendezvous point easily—at least, they could if Monkey was with them.

  Them?

  Who did he think they were going to be? He had sent word with two older girls who ordinarily would despise anything said by a younger student like Dabeet. The one who had seemed to take him seriously might have been mocked into noncompliance by her eye-rolling friend thirty seconds after Dabeet left them. Why did he imagine that his message had been delivered?

  He laddered his way through the elevator shaft to the top level, then got into the maintenance corridors and climbed to the uppermost service corridor. There were carts here, just like in the finished portion, and as soon as Dabeet came to one he got on and ordered it to move forward toward the rendezvous point.

  Even if they got the message, what guarantee did he have that Monkey and Zhang or anybody else would be allowed to come and meet with him, even if they wanted to? “You want to desert your post and go get more information from the koncho who brought all this down on us?” “Yes sir, because unbeknownst to everybody, he’s actually not a bag of charach, he’s a wise and reliable hareess, looking out for all of us from his watchtower.”