Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(101)

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 watching.

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?