Children of the Fleet

by Orson Scott Card

  —The heart of that fatherless boy was broken from birth, do you think I don’t know that? But he never tried to assert ownership of this crisis. He never tried to take charge of things. He only looked for ways he could help. Isn’t that right?

  —Yes, you’re right. I should have realized how remarkable that was.

  —Could you have been that self-restrained?

  —In all the charges brought against me in what we laughingly call my military career, I was never accused of self-restraint.

  —My whole career consisted of deliberate self-restraint—but I was only biding my time until I could get my way, enact my plan. I don’t think Dabeet has a plan.

  —Wise boy.

  —We’ll just have to see how well and quickly he reacts to whatever comes.

  —What if there’s no time to react? What if they simply blast the station to bits upon arrival?

  —The soldiers on this raid don’t know it’s a one-way ticket. They think they’re coming home. They don’t even think they’re going to have to kill anybody.

  —Somebody must know.

  —Are you sure of that? Remember who put this all together. Achilles isn’t happy when he has to trust other people to cooperate with his plans. He prefers to deceive everybody, betray everybody. He serves no higher cause that other people would willingly die for. So if he wants everybody to die, he has to fool them into thinking and acting as if they were all going to survive.

  —I’m not sure what’s more disturbing: that you think you know Dabeet, or that you think you understand Achilles.

  —Achilles has had plenty of time to teach us who he is. Dabeet is still finding out. So I don’t think I know Dabeet. And I think I know Achilles only well enough to predict how he’ll treat anybody who trusts him.

  It became a question of sleep. Specifically, this was the question:

  If watching for the raiders’ ship is so unimportant that it’s all right for me to take a ten- or six- or four-hour break in order to sleep, then why is it important enough to warrant my spending every waking moment doing it?

  And then there was the obvious corollary:

  If I don’t sleep, isn’t it possible I’ll doze off while outside the station? Would the suit’s gloves still hold me in place? Or if I’m awake, after a fashion, and I see the ship, what then? If I’m so sleepy that my mental function is impaired, how can I possibly do anything useful?

  Then there was the question of food. He was hungry. The suits—he was rotating among three, recharging two while he wore the third—kept him hydrated, but he was already weak with hunger. Yet how would he get food without revealing himself to someone?

  Was there any danger from revealing himself? He imagined that most kids thought he had gone with Urska Kaluza, but he was equally certain that none of them cared whether he had or not. And if they saw him, what would be the negative consequence?

  Here’s what he imagined: He wasn’t important at Fleet School, but he might be important to the raiders. They had singled him out by holding Mother hostage and getting him to open that door. What if they had some use for him, and looked for him as soon as they arrived? Would it be better to have the other kids say, He left with Urska Kaluza on a packet ship, or to have them say, He’s here somewhere?

  He couldn’t function if he was weak from hunger. He really couldn’t function without sleep. Compared to this, the problem of the stinking urine bucket was trivial.

  Dabeet remembered back to his time at the Charles G. Conn School for the Gifted. If you missed a meal in the cafeteria, there was a snack buffet. If everything there was stale or dried out or simply gone or not to your liking, you could use vending machines in the study hall. There were choices.

  In Fleet School, there was whatever mess you were assigned to, and nothing else. There were mealtimes, and no other times.

  The suits had internal clocks, so he knew that it was almost breakfast time in his mess. He could eat, then maybe shower, then sleep up here in the top corridor for fifteen minutes, and then go back on duty.

  He could not, could not, enlist some other kid to keep watch with him. Everybody else had assignments that were important to whatever defense command had been created among the students. Dabeet couldn’t be seen as thinking his foolish self-assigned watch duty took priority over official jobs. The last thing he needed was more grounds for resentment or hostility to him. There might well come a time when he needed to be able to present a plan for immediate action and have it evaluated on its merits, rather than through a haze of hatred.

  Eat, shower, sleep. That was his decision.

  He woke up about an hour before lunch, having inadvertently skipped ahead to the sleep portion of his plan. He was still half in his suit, which he had not hung back up to recharge.

  Go back outside and scan the sky again, before eating and showering?

  If they come, they come. I’m really not doing anything important. I’m only keeping watch because it was what I could think of that I could do alone. Except I can’t do it alone. My marvelous brilliant superior brain still needs sleep just like any other animal. Too bad I can’t have the sides of my brain take turns sleeping, like a dolphin. Dolphins don’t go into space. They can’t get their flippers properly into spacesuit gloves. Stop trying to think and go eat. Be first in line.

  Instead, he went to the shower because nobody else would be there. Either they were all in class—what else would the teachers do with them?—or they were doing some assignment for the Fleet School Defense Command, or whatever the name was, if it had a name. Nobody would be assigned to shower.

  It felt good to be clean. Even when he put back on the same unwashed uniform it felt good.

  He was still first in line at the mess. Nobody else was there early. Apparently they were busy. Or in class. That’s right, the last morning class let out fifteen minutes after the official lunch mess began because, of course, this was the IF.

  The lunchroom staff wasn’t so much surprised to see Dabeet as it was surprised to see anybody. They were apparently so used to having nobody show up until fifteen minutes later that the door didn’t slide open on time and he had to slap the door hard to get the attention of the people inside.

  “Well, we’re impatient, aren’t we,” said the noncom who opened it.

  “Hungry. Sorry,” said Dabeet. What he had wanted to say, what he would have said at Charles G. Conn, was, How about doing your job so people don’t have to get impatient? But Dabeet was trying to extend his new, human, less-despicable personality to everyone, not just people he needed things from.

  Though actually he needed something from the kitchen staff, didn’t he.

  “You don’t show up on the roster.”

  “You know my face. You see me here all the time.”

  “But your name isn’t on the list anymore.”

  “That’s because somebody thought I was leaving the station a couple of days ago, and then I didn’t, and the people who could have put me back on the list went with that ship, so what am I supposed to do, starve? Then you’ll just have to drag my desiccating skeleton away from the door. Isn’t it simpler to give me food?”

  He tried to say it with wry humor. One of the cooks got a smile, but nobody else seemed to think he was amusing at all.

  “What did you do for the last five meals, when you didn’t show up?” asked the noncom.

  “Starved,” said Dabeet.

  “That’s your best bet,” said the noncom.

  “You have the food. You always throw some away after every meal. Please throw some away now by giving it to a beggar boy who’s not on the list but is still, by evidence of your own eyes, alive and present at mealtime.”

  “What can you do?” said the head cook, who was probably the noncom’s boss. “He said ‘please.’”

  Dabeet was relieved that instead of skimping, they had taken his skipping of five meals seriously, and he had extra-large portions of everything. None of the food was as tasty as what even the poor
est families in the barrio got, but that was the military and he was used to it. What he needed now was calories. He tried to eat methodically, not taking a new bite until he had thoroughly chewed and swallowed the previous one. Still, he polished it off in less than ten minutes. None of the other students had arrived when he carefully took his tray to the cleaning stack, sorted the silverware and cup, and scraped the leftover biomass.

  Dabeet stopped at the serving window. They looked at him like they were getting ready to say, Didn’t we already give you enough? But before anyone else could speak, Dabeet said, from the heart, “Thank you so much. That was very kind of you.” Then he pushed away from the counter and headed for the door.

  “Wait,” called the noncom.

  Dabeet turned, saw her beckon, and walked back to the window. She handed him a bag. “Rolls,” she said. “They’ll stay fresh in this bag for a couple of days. In case you have to skip the next five meals.”

  It was a sign of how tired Dabeet was that tears sprang into his eyes. “Thank you,” he said, and turned away to hide his emotions. Of course it didn’t work, he knew they had seen, but except for Mother such unasked-for kindness had never happened to him. He didn’t know how to deal with the combination of weariness, surprise, and gratitude.

  “Go save the world,” said the noncom. It had been the standard farewell from the kitchen staff during Battle School days. They were the only ones left from that era.

  Won’t save the world, thought Dabeet as he went through the mess-hall door. Just the station. Maybe.

  There were students coming toward the mess hall now, all from the same direction, because that was the nearest elevator. Dabeet turned and walked the other way. These corridors were wheels, after all. He didn’t want to talk to anybody, explain anything, or even have rumors flying: I saw him. Coming out of the mess hall. He’s still on the ship.

  Not that anybody would care enough to spread a rumor.

  Not that the kids he saw wouldn’t have recognized him, so it was already too late to stop the rumors.

  Nobody was on the up elevator, and soon he was back at his station, where all three suits were in their charging stations. He took the one that was next in line.

  There are suits at all the other airlock doors, he reminded himself. And the other airlock doors don’t have stinking piss buckets standing by.

  No time to go empty it.

  No, you’re not going to dump it into space. No reason anybody should have to cope with little pellets of piss-ice out there, colliding with all the surfaces of the station.

  Besides which I’d probably get it all over the spacesuit. If it didn’t freeze in the bottom of the bucket the moment I got it outside.

  He made it through the airlock again, and closed the door while gripping the outside bar, as usual. Then he made his way to the top of the inner wheel and looked toward the loading dock of the bottom ring of the unfinished portion of the station.

  There was a ship attaching to the loading dock.

  It was bigger than the packet, and while it displayed a registry number, it was not an IF ship. In fact, if Dabeet had learned his corporate sigils, this wasn’t just a corporate ship, it was a Juke vessel, and it was designed to carry passengers and a cargo, too.

  Why would a Juke vessel come here? Jukes had nothing to do with Fleet School. So there was no innocent explanation. The raiders had commandeered, hijacked, or simply chartered a Juke vessel for this attack on the school.

  So now what do I do, go back inside and race up and down the corridors shouting, “Run for your lives, the bogeymen are here!”?

  Wouldn’t it be nice if he had his desk.

  Dabeet supposed that he could get from this set of station wheels to that one without going inside. The connecting passage was only a quarter of the way around the wheel. He could do that, naming every handhold, in a couple of hours.

  Or he could go inside, take off the suit, maybe give a warning to somebody, and then run through the corridors and be in place in about ten minutes.

  In place? What place? Had the airlocks in the new part of the station been equipped with spacesuits? Recharging stations? Did the emergency one-man airlocks even work?

  The airlocks had to work because who would be insane enough not to have a way for workmen to get back inside safely. The suits, though, were iffy.

  He got inside, took off the suit, then detached the next suit, fully charged, from its station. Carrying it, he went along to the highest corridor, closed the access door behind him, and began to jog along toward the pass-through to the new wheel.

  As he expected, in the down elevator to the middle level of the middle wheel, he ran into a couple of older girls he sort of knew.

  “Going home, Dirtman?” asked one of them.

  “You know those suits can’t do reentry, right?”

  Dabeet showed neither annoyance nor amusement. “The raiders are here. They just docked on the bottom level of the new construction.”

  They looked at him blankly.

  “Do you know who Monkey is? Zhang He?”

  One rolled her eyes. The other seemed to realize that he was serious. “Yes,” she said.

  “Please tell them that Dabeet says they’re here. I saw the ship, not the people, so I don’t know how many. I’m going to do recon and I’ll report to whoever makes it to the topmost corridor in the new wheel. Got it?”

  “Got it,” she said. The other one also nodded.

  “Whatever plan they’ve cooked up, it starts now,” said Dabeet.

  “Yes sir,” said the girl whose eyes hadn’t rolled.

  Then Dabeet got out and ran to the pass-through.

  Depending on how quickly the raiders debarked and deployed, it might already be too late to get into the hidden corridors unseen.

  But it wasn’t. They were taking their time. Or maybe docking took longer than Dabeet had feared. He didn’t see or hear anyone before he got up to the top corridor and then to the uppermost secret corridor. There were no suits at the first airlock. Well, that made sense. He attached his suit to a recharge station. Another bust. The stations didn’t have water, they didn’t have air, they didn’t have power. He’d have whatever was in this suit and nothing else.

  So he couldn’t afford to waste time traversing a long section of the hull. He needed an airlock as close to the docked ship as he could get. Only how to translate outside distances to inside ones? Why hadn’t he counted airlocks when he saw the ship dock?

  Well, he had counted them, because he had looked along the whole distance from the Juke ship to the pass-through. He closed his eyes and calmly reviewed his memory. There were two easy ways to find the right airlock. First, he could count to eleven. Second, he could go until the corridor dead-ended where the workers had sealed it off, because on the inner ring, the Juke ship was docked almost directly below the last airlock before the inner ring’s construction had left off.

  His count was right. Eleven. And there was the end. Nice to know he could still trust his memory.

  The recharge stations didn’t work, there were no suits, but the airlocks had to work—which meant they must have several charges of atmo, too. And … yes. Once inside the airlock, he flushed the atmo back into the system and everything worked exactly right. He opened the door, held on to the outside bar, and …

  And the corner gaps weren’t there. He looked closely and realized that the surface of the hull-under-construction hadn’t been plated yet. It had nanooze all over it, so it looked the same from across the gap between wheels. But the system of plates with gaps at the corners had not yet been installed.

  Well, wouldn’t it have been nice to find that out a few days ago? Or even during the time I was supposedly watching for these raiders to arrive.

  Is Mother on that ship?

  He pushed that thought aside and considered his options.

  He could go to a lower airlock, on the level just above the docked ship, but that would mean using corridors that the raiders might be watc
hing.

  Or he could creep down the hull like a silverfish scurrying along a ceiling, letting the nanooze hold him to the ship.

  Completely different technique, one he had never tried. If he gave a sudden lurch, he might push himself free of the nanooze. The stuff had been designed so people in spacesuits could walk on it.

  Don’t walk. Don’t run.

  É, Monkey, I’ll do neither. I’ll creep. Not slither, not crawl. I’ll keep maximum body contact with the nanooze and let it hold me right down the outside of the hull, to the docking area, so I can …

  Do what? Look through the ship’s windows to see if Mother’s tied to a chair inside with duct tape over her mouth? What kind of idiotic movie do I think I’m in?

  A Juke ship would also have a nanooze surface. It would also have emergency airlocks on the outside. He might be able to get into the ship. That way, the raiders could conveniently kill him right on their own ship instead of having to hunt for him through the whole station.

  They don’t want to kill me.

  I don’t know what they want. If I come into their ship from the outside, dressed in a regular spacesuit, they’ll kill me before they realize from my size that I’m a child.

  Well, what else did I think I was going to do? I can’t do recon from inside the station. What will I learn there, without exposing myself to detection and capture? The only thing we don’t know about is the ship. How many soldiers does it have seats for? What kind of weapons are they carrying? Can we steal any of them for our own use? Do they have room to take hostages with them? If they don’t, does that mean they plan to kill us all?

  While these questions and speculations ran through Dabeet’s mind, he was experimenting with the nanooze—without ever letting go of the airlock bar. He found that it did take some effort to pull away from the nanooze. Being composed of millions of tiny intelligent-networking robots, the nanooze knew the difference between full-body contact and boot or glove contact. When he attached to the nanooze with only one hand and both knees, the nanooze held tightly, so it took a deliberate effort to pull any of those body parts free. And he couldn’t pull more than one part free at a time. So the nanooze had the rule about not letting go of one handhold till you’ve got a grip on the next. It was designed specifically for his purpose. It was meant to hold somebody to the hull without preventing them from moving.