“I tripped,” said Dabeet. “And then it took a few seconds to get through the door and stand on the surface and find where the station was, so I could jump toward it.”
“You call that jumping ‘toward’ the station?” asked Ragnar.
“Best I could—”
They laughed. Ragnar slapped him lightly upside the head.
“Joking,” said Ragnar.
“Take a joke, dollback,” said Ignazio.
“Sorry,” said Dabeet. “Give me a few minutes, I’ll see how funny it is.”
“No you won’t,” said Zhang He, “because it isn’t. We’re just relieved. And yes, zhopa-brain, you saved us all. We know you didn’t choose for these marubos to come up here and you sure didn’t choose for them to try to blow us out of the sky, but you lissed into their ship and you sussed it all and you got us with you and—”
“I’m really glad you came. I didn’t know if you would.”
“What if we hadn’t?” asked Ja.
“I don’t know,” said Dabeet. “Maybe I would have thought of blowing the airlock to get the ship away. But I sure hadn’t thought of it up till you guys started saying it was the obvious thing to do.”
“You’re going to be a lousy bureaucrat,” said Zhang. “You don’t even know how to modestly take all the credit.”
“If you had thought of it,” said Ragnar. “By yourself. Alone. What then?”
Dabeet shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I wouldn’t have known where to look for the airlock release button.”
“You would have found it,” said Ja. “Because of the sign all over the inside of the inner door that says, ‘Airlock Release Button.’”
Ragnar scoffed. “But would you have—”
“He would have pressed it,” said Zhang He. “You know he would. Because he’s taking this whole thing onto himself. He thinks it’s his fault. He would have done it.”
Dabeet had no idea if Zhang He was right, but with everybody else nodding and murmuring, “é, certo, claro, right,” he didn’t see any reason to raise an argument.
But he had to say something. “I’m glad you guys showed up. I’m glad Monkey knew how to pull somebody out of space like that. I’m glad you knew how to run the tether. I’m glad it took them long enough to detonate that we could get away from the ship. Thank you.” Then he burst into tears. He didn’t know why. They just erupted from his eyes, his body convulsed in sobs.
Only for a couple of seconds. Maybe five. Or ten. Monkey was hugging him, a couple of others had their hands on him, gripping his shoulders, his upper arms. “Good job,” said Ja. “Proud to know you,” said Zhang He.
And then the crying stopped, as quickly and involuntarily as it had started.
“We’ve still got a bunch of bunducks on this station,” said Dabeet.
“If the plans worked,” said Ja, “they’re all in the four battlerooms by now, along with all the older students. Teachers in the embarcation hub with the younger kids. You know, the ones our age.”
“And a year older,” added Ignazio, snickering.
“They can still do a lot of damage,” said Monkey.
“Could you feel the explosion here? Inside the station?” asked Dabeet.
“Whole thing shuddered,” said Ragnar.
“Earthquake,” said Ja. “Felt like a major quake.”
“So they know something happened,” said Dabeet. “If we put the right spin on this, maybe we can talk them into surrendering.”
“Surrendering to kids?”
“Surrendering to whatever IF forces come racing here after they detected the explosion,” said Dabeet.
“Oh, those guys,” said Ragnar.
“Got to talk to them before anybody gets hurt or killed in the battlerooms,” said Monkey.
“Controls in Urska Kaluza’s quarters, public-address system all over the station,” said Ignazio.
“If we can get in there,” said Timeon.
“Let’s go find out,” said Ja.
Two minutes to run the pass-through and get to the commandant’s quarters. Didn’t meet a single raider. The door was wide open. An old-fashioned microphone sat on the table. It took Ignazio a few seconds to bring up the commands from the control panel. “Should be wide now, they can hear it everywhere,” said Ignazio.
“You sure?”
“I’m sure I selected ‘All Speakers’ and ‘All Area’ and ‘Full Volume,’” said Ignazio.
Dabeet pushed the microphone toward Ja.
“Não, bicho,” said Ja. “Not me.”
“You’re the commander,” said Zhang He.
“I’m team leader of a bunch of children,” said Ja. Then he pushed the microphone toward Dabeet.
“Me?” asked Dabeet. “Why?”
“No time to find a grownup,” said Monkey.
“Nobody here knows how to talk with authority,” said Zhang He. “So we’ll have to make do with insufferable arrogance.” Zhang He grinned. Almost sincerely.
Dabeet put his hand on the microphone and took a couple of breaths. Composing himself. He still had no idea what to say, but they were right. He had withered adults with his scorn back in the Charles G. Conn School for the Gifted. That was the closest they were going to come to a voice of command.
Monkey whispered, “No school slang.”
Dabeet nodded. “Greetings, all you soldiers who made this unprovoked attack against the children of Fleet School. Everybody stop whatever you’re doing and listen. Now!”
He made his voice like a whip. But he sure wished that he knew if anybody was listening.
“Whatever you thought your mission was, they lied to you. Your mission was really this: To bring a ship filled with Vacoplaz, attach it to Fleet School Station, and blow us all to hell. Including you. Every one of you. There was no escape plan, there was no evacuation plan, the only plan was to get you here and kill everybody on the station.”
He tried to imagine what they might be saying in the four battlerooms. Doubts? Challenges? Officers ordering the others to pay no attention? Time to prove what he was saying, as best he could.
“We got on board your unguarded ship and found the Vacoplaz. There was no way we could pull thousands of blasting caps out of the ’plaz. So we popped the airlock and blew your ship away from the station. Whoever was controlling the Vacoplaz back on Earth took long enough to realize what had happened and trigger it that the ship was far enough that the station wasn’t destroyed. But you felt the blast. Like an earthquake. You felt it. What do you think could cause a jolt like that? All the kids in Fleet School stomping their feet at the same moment? You know I’m telling you the truth.”
Dabeet looked at the others. The ones who weren’t grinning were nodding.
“Your ship is a bunch of dust and chunks heading toward Earth reentry, the Moon, and mostly outer space. There’s nobody coming to pick you up because they expected the whole station, including your bodies, to be dust and chunks by now. You’ve been betrayed. And any officers telling you not to listen to me, they’re still part of that betrayal. Shut them up so you can hear what I’m going to tell you now.”
Dabeet looked at Ja, who was smiling tightly and shaking his head. Dabeet shrugged, in effect asking him, If that was wrong, what should I say instead?
But Ja smiled more broadly and gestured to him to go on. Thumbs-up from Ragnar. Slap on the back from Timeon.
“A relieving force from the IF will be here soon. If they find you holding any child or teacher as a hostage, you can be sure that there’ll be a lot of dying here today. Maybe some of us, but most definitely all of you. The IF doesn’t take it kindly when somebody kidnaps their children. So forget any idea of hostage negotiation. We’re not your hostages anyway. You are now our prisoners. Do you understand that? If the IF comes here and finds that you are all in custody, having surrendered to the students of Fleet School, then there will be no killing. Except for whatever officers you had to kill just now to get them to shut up.”
Monkey rolled her eyes, but he got thumbs-up from Zhang He and Ragnar.
“Let go of your weapons and come out into open space. The students will gather up your weapons and take them out of the battlerooms. You invaders will remain in the battlerooms until the IF forces enter to formally accept your surrender and to interrogate you about whoever it was on Earth who sent you here. I suggest full cooperation. And don’t bother waiting till you have legal representation. It’s military law out here. Tell them everything. You don’t owe a thing to those lying bastards back on Earth.”
Dabeet stood there for a moment, trying to think if there was anything else he needed to say.
Just one thing. “If any of the invaders are not in a battleroom, then you will either get yourself into a battleroom, or you can head for the airlock where you left your ship, open the door, and jump on out.”
That was it. That was all. Dabeet looked at Ignazio and made a throat-cutting gesture. Ignazio punched a spot in the holospace and then grinned. “Mike’s off,” he said. “Toguro, man.”
“Should I repeat it?” asked Dabeet. “Was it clear?”
“You got a voice like a whip,” said Ja. “You were the man for the job.”
“So that’s my career now,” said Dabeet. “Public relations.”
A couple of them laughed. The ones who had lived on Earth. The spaceborn had no reason to know what “public relations” even meant.
“I think we need to go and see whether they’re actually doing what Dabeet said,” Zhang He suggested.
Dabeet made as if to go with them, but Ja put a hand on his chest and stopped him. “You stay here. You, too, Cynthia.”
Monkey’s eyes flashed with resentment, but whether it was at the instruction to stay behind or at the use of her given name, Dabeet couldn’t guess.
“You two have been through enough,” said Ja. “Taken enough risk. If these bunducks are still shooting or taking hostages or whatever, you don’t need to be in it. You’ve done your part.”
“Leave Ignazio with us?” asked Dabeet. “In case we need to make another announcement?”
“Koncho,” said Ignazio. But he also stayed.
After a few minutes with the three of them alone in Urska Kaluza’s quarters, Dabeet began to go around the room, palming open everything that looked like a door. Lots of cupboards. Enough dishes to serve a six-course meal at the big table. Two different bathrooms, presumably one for guests and the other, with a luxurious bath and shower, for the commandant. A cupboard of snacks, which they immediately began sampling, and a refrigerator with food and drinks, with and without alcohol.
“Don’t even think about it,” Monkey told Ignazio, who was fingering a bottle of scotch. “You have no idea what your body’s tolerance for alcohol is, and you don’t want the official report on this to say that they found you drunk.”
“Besides, if somebody’s keeping scotch in the fridge,” said Dabeet, “it means they’re too stupid to choose decent scotch in the first place.”
“Oh, you’re the expert,” said Monkey.
“Room temperature except for American beer and a few wines,” said Dabeet. “I was raised by a civilized mother.”
Ignazio set down the bottle and picked up a soft-drink can with a label printed in cyrillic characters. He poured it out into a glass and it looked like some kind of fizzy fruit juice. Pretty soon they were working their way through the fridge and the snack cupboard, reviewing it all as snidely as possible.
After a half hour or so, Ragnar came back with news. Two officers dead, killed by their own men when Dabeet told them, over the public-address system, to shut them up. Otherwise, no casualties.
The raid hadn’t gotten that far, anyway. When the raiders pursued the students into the battlerooms, they had been confused by the network of walls and pillars and bridges they had built. They couldn’t see any kids and they didn’t know how to find their way through the maze. Then the shock hit the station and everybody stopped moving while the officers screamed about how they had a job to do, now do it … and nobody did anything.
“So what are they doing now?” asked Monkey.
“One of the older kids got some teachers out of Embarcation and they turned on the gravitics in the battlerooms. All the kids are out, all the raiders are in. The doors are locked.”
Dabeet felt relieved.
“And here’s the thing,” said Ragnar. “Not one person asked, ‘Who was that on the loudspeakers?’ They all knew.”
Dabeet knew exactly what that meant, but he tried to put a good face on it. “When the job requires an asshole,” he said, “I’m your man.”
“It wasn’t a bad thing,” said Ragnar. “I didn’t mean that as a bad thing.”
“I know,” said Dabeet. And he did know. But despite Ragnar’s intention, it was a bad thing. It meant that with not all that much time at Fleet School, Dabeet was famous for sounding arrogant and scornful. It might have been useful this time, but it wasn’t something Dabeet would ever be proud of.
It took three hours for the first IF ship to dock at Embarcation. By the time any marines made it to the battlerooms, the teachers had already filled them in on what happened. It was another couple of hours before anybody came to the commandant’s quarters.
The marine colonel who led a couple of noncoms into the room looked surprised to see Monkey, Ignazio, and Dabeet there.
“This is the best of the soft drinks,” said Monkey. “There’s still plenty in the fridge.” Of course she had indicated the one that they all hated worst, because she was, after all, still Monkey.
“What are you kids doing in here?” asked the colonel.
“Being naughty,” said Ignazio. “After ejecting the raiders’ ship and getting the ones still on the station to surrender, we figured it was time for a snack and Urska Kaluza kept all the best stuff for herself.”
“Are you drunk?” asked the colonel.
Ignazio looked at Monkey and Dabeet. “If they think I’m drunk anyway, you could have let me actually have some of the scotch.”
“Not scotch from a fridge,” said Dabeet. “You deserve better.”
By then a couple of teachers had come into the room. “This is where they made the announcement from,” said the astrogation teacher. “It was that one.” She pointed at Dabeet. “Said all the right things and they complied.”
The marine colonel looked at Dabeet, then at Monkey and Ignazio. His attitude changed visibly. “Good show, then,” he said.
“I think,” said the astrogation teacher, “that they were also on the team that detached the ship before it blew.”
“You seriously did that?” asked the colonel.
“Is the station completely pulverized and everybody dead?” asked Monkey. “No? Then yes, we did it very seriously.” She pointed at Dabeet. “He was the one who blew the airlock on the ship. Also found the Vacoplaz and figured out what was going on. Dabeet Ochoa.”
“And she came out and brought me back to the station,” said Dabeet. “She almost died doing it. Her name is Munk.”
“Cynthia Munk,” said Ignazio, ducking as she slapped at his head.
Dabeet named the rest of the team, starting with Ignazio.
“You planned this?” asked the colonel.
“Hell no,” said Monkey. “How could we figure somebody would bring two thousand–plus packets of Vacoplaz to blow up a school full of children? We just made it up as we went along.”
The colonel turned to the teachers. “I thought this wasn’t a military school anymore.”
“We’re space kids,” said Ignazio. Considering that he had grown up in Cádiz, that was stretching the truth a little. But not much. They were space kids now. Even Dabeet. All of them.
Monkey backed him up. “This wasn’t a military situation, not with the ship and the Vacoplaz. It was an equipment malfunction and we did exactly what we would have done on any mining ship in the Belt.”
The marine colonel grinned. “Got it,” he said. He waved a
hand toward the treat-strewn table. “Carry on.”
As he was leaving, Dabeet asked, “Are all the kids OK? All the teachers? All the kitchen staff?”
The colonel turned. “No casualties among station personnel. Didn’t know you had kitchen staff aboard.”
“Maybe they stayed in the kitchen,” said Ignazio. “In which case, maybe they’ll serve dinner.”
“I’ll check on that,” said the history teacher. “Everybody must be about starving by now.”
“Two officers dead, two seriously injured. One from each battleroom. We’ve listened to the recording of your announcement.” He looked at Dabeet. “You, right?”
Dabeet nodded.
“If you ever need a job as a drill sergeant,” he said. Then he grinned. “You asked about the other kids,” he said. “And the teachers, and the kitchen staff. That’s how a commander thinks. That’s what I heard in that recording. A commander.”
Then the marines and the teachers left and it was just the three of them again.
“A commander,” said Ignazio, in exaggerated awe.
“Still a yelda,” said Monkey. “But you’ve got kintamas.”
“Giant ones,” said Ignazio. “Don’t know how you get your pants on.”
19
—So what’s your plan now? Live forever? Not much point in that, I can tell you. Endless voyaging at lightspeed is indistinguishable from prison.
—Except you get a better quality of visitor.
—You visited me on that horrible voyage only because you wanted something from me.
—And I got it. Because you wanted to give it.
—When you consider, sir, how little you intervene, will it make any difference whether you live to see the fruits of your labors?
—Curiosity is a reasonable ambition.
—There are no reasonable ambitions. They all involve hope for a future in which your favorite things remain unchanged, and the things you detest are transformed into something wonderful.
—My curiosity is just as satisfied with bad results.
—There is no curiosity without hope, and there is no hope without disappointment. If all the colonies failed, or if the Formics return with a vast armada and do to Earth what we did to their home world, would you really want to be there to see it?
Children of the Fleet Page 34