Children of the Fleet

by Orson Scott Card

  Dabeet didn’t wait for him. Halfway to the door he realized that with what he intended to do right now—hide from whatever they were summoning him for—he shouldn’t carry his desk along with him. He handed it to Monkey as if he were returning something that belonged to her. “Thanks,” he said. Then he was out the door, which closed to cut off the teacher’s voice saying, “I really need to check on…”

  They would know what class I’m in, so they’ll already have somebody heading here. Whoever “they” is.

  Dabeet ducked into the first janitorial closet he reached and pulled the door closed behind him. Then he got to the first ladderway and went to the uppermost passage on the middle level.

  In a few moments, he was in a spacesuit, in an airlock, and then outside.

  Good thing he had already practiced getting from the middle wheel to the upper wheel of the station. He could get back inside somewhere other than the classroom level. But for the moment, he held on to the outside bar, with the airlock closed and recharging beside him.

  Why am I running? When did I decide to hide?

  It wasn’t implausible that he would be reassigned. With all the nasty reports Urska Kaluza had certainly made about him, getting him out of Fleet School might well be a priority.

  But Urska Kaluza was also being reassigned. And why all the training officers?

  That was what didn’t ring true. There was no reason to take them all at once—nothing could be more disruptive to their education. Teachers could come and go, as their assignments expired or new expertise was needed. Nobody much cared. There were teachers they liked, even some they respected, but they weren’t part of their lives. The training officers, though, they were a different story entirely.

  If the station were attacked, the training officers might take command, and if they did, their students would rally around them and obey. That would be a potential disaster for their defense preparations, since they were not part of any of the team organizations, and it would completely disrupt whatever the kids had already planned. But if you knew the station was going to be raided, and you didn’t know that the students were planning an organized resistance, then getting the training officers out of Fleet School would look like an essential move.

  Likewise, getting rid of Urska Kaluza—if they thought she was really worth something as a leader, then of course they wanted her gone. And if she was in collusion with the raiders, having her off the station would have been part of their deal.

  Whoever was moving them off the station knew about the raid, that was clear enough. Dabeet might have reasoned it out only now, clinging to the outside of the hull, but apparently at some limbic level he had known it instantly.

  If he left the station now, and then the raid came, nobody would believe he hadn’t been warned in advance. They would be sure he had lied to them, concealed information, betrayed them.

  Here I am, clinging to the outside of the station. I’m as gone, as far as the other kids know, as if I had been spirited away on whatever ship was taking good old Urska Kaluza.

  Poor me.

  Dabeet forced himself to calm down and think. Was there something useful he could do right now? Yes. He could see Embarcation 2 from here. Or, rather, he could see any ship that was docked there.

  But not very well. The tail end of something.

  He wouldn’t have to move very far along the wheel to get a better view. One airlock away. Maybe two.

  He was about to move across the closed airlock door, but then he stopped himself. “The bar on the other side of the airlock. Attached to the hull.” Then he reached for it. Naming each gap in the plates, the lips on the center band, he made it to the next airlock.

  Clearly the back end of a ship. But that much he already knew.

  Carefully, gap by gap, plate by plate, he made it to the airlock after that. And now he could see the IF insignia. An official ship, not a raider, not a yacht, a real ship. Small. Not even a cruiser, more like a messenger. But it would be armed, because all IF ships were armed. This little packet boat could probably blow the raiders out of the sky. But it wouldn’t be here. It would be gone.

  Well, it would be gone if they gave up on finding Dabeet and went without him.

  If I don’t go with them, I may well die.

  He immediately answered his own thought with another: If I go with them, all the others may die.

  He almost laughed at himself. You think you can save everybody? You think your absence will doom them to a miserable death? Even if we’re facing Goliath, Dabeet, you’re no David.

  I will be if that’s what I need to be, Dabeet told himself. I won’t be a great hero-king whose name will live for three thousand years. But I’ll do an adequate job of whatever needs doing.

  He memorized the ship’s number and then settled down to wait.

  After only a few minutes, he remembered that even if they weren’t tracking his suit, they certainly would have a record of his airlock door opening. If somebody poked their head out right now, he’d be in plain view.

  Carefully, naming every gap, every reach, Dabeet made his way from the middle wheel to the inner one, the topmost of the three. It was tricky because the three wheels hadn’t been designed to move together. Instead, the inner wheel ran on a track along the inside of the middle wheel, just as the outer wheel ran on a track along the outside of the middle wheel.

  Originally, the three wheels had moved at their own rate, so that the false gravity from centrifugal force would be roughly even among the wheels, innermost to outermost. Ah, the things that engineers had to cope with, in the days before the Jukes corporation did its breakthrough work with gravitics.

  But how did they get from wheel to wheel? Now, with the wheels in lockstep, they had the elevator shafts from level to level and wheel to wheel. In the original design, how would teachers and students get from their residential levels to the classroom level?

  It wasn’t a school, then, of course. The station was built before the arrival of the first Formic ship, before there was an International Fleet. It was meant to be a permanent way station between Earth and Moon, perhaps a depot or transshipment facility. Maybe a way station for Terran and Lunar shuttles. Maybe a resort, a hotel and restaurant and spa for people who were ridiculously rich.

  Maybe one wheel for each purpose. Each one supplied and administered separately. All this expense for what, commerce? The tourist trade?

  But all this was back in the days before Jukes’s breakthroughs in the science of gravity led to the technology of gravitics. Before the Jukes Gravic Downmaster eliminated freefall inside space vehicles, except where you wanted it. Gravic fields could be fine-tuned to provide just the right downward pull in every location. Science was amazing in those days—before the Formics ever came. Maybe because space was still new, the solar system was still pioneer territory.

  Why, the people who built this primitive wheel design probably still thought there were only four forces, and still imagined they could find the Grand Unified Theory—a notion that had gone the way of the Philosopher’s Stone and Aether and the elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. Yet the station was still in place, still turning—for stability now rather than for illusory gravity—and still protecting its inhabitants from radiation, dust collisions, and the near-vacuum of space. Rather like the Roman roads whose pavement, however overgrown, still ran across Britain, Gaul, Italy, Iberia, and northern Africa.

  Old space stations like this could be retrofitted fairly safely because they weren’t going anywhere. They didn’t have to be built to withstand powerful acceleration and deceleration, or to cope with collisions with high-velocity dust as a spaceship neared lightspeed. There was no way to keep the really old spaceships in service except in near-Earth traffic, shuttling among stations, ships, and the Moon. A station like Fleet School, though, stayed in its position at L-5, used for whatever purpose the IF still had for it.

  The differential in movement between the wheels had never been very fast. Because wor
kmen were expected to have to work on the juncture between the wheels, there were handrails above and below the tracks, precisely so that workers could do exactly what Dabeet needed to do—move from wheel to wheel without danger.

  Only Dabeet was thinking the way Monkey had taught him to think: What is the safest way? The rings were now locked in place by struts connecting the wheels, and by moving only a few panels to the nearest strut, Dabeet could grip the strut and walk it hand-over-hand “up” to the next wheel. It was a safer grip, a shorter path, and didn’t require him to go into the wedgelike space between tubes.

  Having climbed the strut, Dabeet was on the inner ring now, and he made his way easily but carefully up to a position near the top. He would be far more visible here than he was down near the juncture, but who would be looking? It wasn’t as if anybody ever looked out the window—there were never any windows on a station like this. Any kind of see-through panel would last only a couple of years at most before microcollisions with dust and debris scored the surface so much that you couldn’t see through it at all. And anything that mattered would have to be detected from much farther away than you could see with the naked eye through a window.

  So nobody would see him unless they were using instruments to deliberately scan the wheels of the school in order to find him. If they wanted him that badly, there was nowhere he could hide.

  From this position, Dabeet had a good view of near space. He knew that any ship that wanted to approach unseen could do it by switching off its blinkers—except when sunlight caught it. Nothing could hide from the stark searchlight of the Sun. Even nanooze didn’t make a ship’s surface completely nonreflective.

  But of course the raiders wouldn’t come now, while the IF packet boat was still docked.

  How long before they gave up on Dabeet?

  How long before he had to go inside to change suits, to replenish his atmo? He had made sure that the top-level spacesuits were fully charged, but he was wearing one from the middle wheel. Less than fifteen minutes left.

  Dabeet made his way to the nearest airlock and clung to the bar there. He couldn’t see whether any ships were approaching, but it was more important to get inside quickly when the time came, change into a fully loaded spacesuit, and then get back out.

  Just as he was about to press the OPEN button on the airlock, he saw the packet boat drift backward out of Embarcation 2. They had stopped looking for him.

  He was watching it clear the embarcation center when his suit alarm went off. Oh, that’s right. The atmo in the spacesuit didn’t care whether they were looking for him or not. He had exactly one minute to get inside before he started to suffer mental degradation from lack of oxygen.

  He made it with thirty-five seconds to spare.

  They had left without him. So he didn’t need to go back outside. Did he?

  What if the teachers had orders to arrest him and hold him for the next ship?

  One thing was clear. If the raiders really had arranged for this IF ship to get him, Urska Kaluza, and the training officers out of the way, that meant he would never get an instruction to open an access door. Which meant that he didn’t have to figure out how to open one of the main airlocks for them when they arrived.

  They didn’t need him. Maybe they had never needed him. Maybe all of this was for no other purpose than to create evidence that he was the Fleet School traitor who was taking orders from the raiders.

  Did that mean Mother was dead? Or soon would be?

  Or had she been dead all along?

  Or had she never been in danger?

  There was no way to know.

  What he could do was keep watch, so when the raiders came, he’d know where their ship was, and which airlock on which wheel they entered through.

  Probably one of the wheels under construction, Dabeet thought.

  I have no basis for deciding what is and is not probable, he replied to himself. It could be anywhere on the station. It could be Embarcation 1 or 2, for all I know. It could be one of the cargo bays. It could be the one-man emergency airlock that I just used to come into the ship. It could be any of them, because they couldn’t be locked. Any worker or soldier or other spacewalker would never be locked out of access to air, on any IF installation, anywhere. Miners and corporate ships and stations followed the same protocol. Hundreds of back doors on this space station. The only security measure was the alarms that went off when an airlock door was opened.

  Mine didn’t set off an alarm, thought Dabeet. I opened it in plenty of time for them to find me, but nobody came in search of me. I was so findable, yet I remained unfound.

  With Robota Smirnova gone, was it possible that the adults didn’t know how to check to see which open airlock had set off an alarm?

  Or was shutting down the alarm system part of the raiders’ plan?

  Or had Urska Kaluza shut the system down as part of her deal with them?

  How can I waste time speculating when I have no pertinent information?

  All this time, Dabeet had been putting on the new, fully charged suit. He would be good for sixteen hours now, before he had to come back in.

  No he wouldn’t.

  He peeled down the suit, opened his uniform, and peed into the first mop bucket he could reach with his suit around his ankles. Very awkward. He had to hold the bucket up above where the suit bunched around his shins, so he wouldn’t spatter urine all over inside the suit. Ah, the glories of being in space.

  The suit itself held plenty of water to keep him hydrated. Real workers would wear a honey suit under the spacesuit to deal with waste elimination, if they expected to be outside for the full sixteen-hour charge. But Dabeet knew that if it became necessary, he’d pee all over inside the suit rather than come inside if his job wasn’t complete.

  What was his job? Sentry. He was the lone sentry on the circular walls of the station. He imagined some solitary Chinese soldier on the Great Wall. Or perhaps the lone Quechua warrior on a pinnacle of the Andes, ready to run and give warning of the approaching Spaniards. He was pretty sure that heroic soldiers didn’t wet themselves. Then again, they could pee off the wall or the pinnacle whenever they wanted, because they weren’t wearing spacesuits.

  He got the suit on, double-checked it even as the suit double-checked itself. All connections secure. All systems fully charged and ready.

  Dabeet stepped back into the airlock, closed the inner door, discharged the air, and in a few moments he was back at the peak of the inner wheel, scanning nearby space, looking for the flash of light that would mean a stealthy ship was approaching through sunlight.

  17

  —Let’s pretend that Dabeet will figure out a way to defeat the terrorists. Let’s say that he and everybody else survive.

  —You’re pretending. I’m predicting.

  —Are you going to tell him who he is? Who you are?

  —What good would that do? It might raise expectations that he would inherit my—what is it I’ve built?

  —Secret government.

  —Web of influence. But it can’t be inherited, it can’t be used by anybody but me, because it’s all personal. Not this office liaising with that office, but me talking to this friend.

  —Or you talking to that mousy, intimidated official, or that ambitious-but-stupid officer—

  —Not really many of those. They aren’t of much use to someone like me. I need the help of competent women and men who share my vision of spreading the human species among as many colonies as possible. I often have to explain to each one how the thing I’m asking them to do relates to that overall purpose. They help me because they can see that I’m leading them to accomplish the only cause that matters now.

  —No coercion at all? No extortion, no blackmailing, no log-rolling?

  —You were one of the toughest birds I ever brought into the aviary. Did I do any of those things to you?

  —Wouldn’t have worked.

  —It wouldn’t work with any of the people I need. Fearless
, independent, insightful, generous people. People who use their own wits to solve problems instead of wringing their hands and wondering what I would want them to do.

  —Too bad people like that rarely run for public office.

  —They do, all the time. Then they lose. There’s always a secret government that nobody knows about except the people who are in it. And they don’t think of it that way. They just know that if they need something done, this is the person to talk to in this department, and that is the person to talk to in another.

  —And you hold all this inside your head.

  —If Dabeet is going to be part of the secret government, he won’t have any trouble holding everything in his head. Perfect memory has its uses.

  —Until you get old and it fades.

  —He’s not old yet. And yours hasn’t faded.

  —Has so. I’d give you an example, but I can’t remember any.

  —Your memory hasn’t faded. Neither will his. Look, I’m doing the job I’m doing, and, once we get enough colonies established, it’ll be done. Over, accomplished. The whole colonization project will take on momentum of its own because people will found new colonies out of pure self-interest. Adam Smith’s invisible hand. So Dabeet won’t need to have my job, because my job won’t exist.

  —Doesn’t mean he won’t still try to do it, if he knows who you are and what you’ve done. He’s competitive. He’ll have to find a way to be better than dear old Dad.

  —You’re wrong about that. Dabeet was raised to be arrogant, his amour propre depended on being the best, the smartest. But I think that’s already been taken out of him. He’s at the level of amour de soi, to use Rousseau’s terms precisely. He doesn’t choose his actions based on what other people think of him. He hasn’t made any effort to force the other kids to do things his way.

  —He’s smart enough to realize you can’t lead if nobody will follow.

  —But ambitious people don’t learn that. They just break their hearts trying.

  —You sure Dabeet isn’t walking around with a broken heart?