Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(105)

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 than 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.”

There’s nobody there. Nobody there.

And then the cart brought the rendezvous point into view, the floor coming into view first. There were feet. More than two pairs of feet. Six pairs. And soon they had faces. Zhang He and Monkey, yes, and the rest of that original team: Ignazio Cabeza, Teburoro Timeon, Ragnar Olafson. And, unbelievably, Bartolomeo Ja, the commander of their army.

Dabeet wanted to weep in relief. He wanted to kneel down and thank every one of them for coming at his call.

Instead, his first words were, “There’s nobody guarding the raiders’ ship. It’s loaded with explosives, enough to destroy the whole station and kill everybody. I think detonation is under the control of somebody on Earth or Luna, and the raiders don’t even know this is a suicide mission.”

They stared at him. In disbelief, he assumed at first, but how could he convince them if they didn’t simply take his word?

Then he realized that their long, long pause had been only a microsecond as they processed everything he said.

“So what’s the plan?” asked Bartolomeo.

“I kind of hoped that you guys who grew up in space would have an idea.”

“Can we pull all the detonators from the explosives?” asked Ignazio.

“I didn’t try,” said Dabeet, “in case pulling one might set off all the rest. And there are…” Dabeet performed the calculation. “I estimate there are 26,928 individual parcels of explosive, each with its own detonator.”

Nobody questioned his arithmetic.

Zhang He said, “I wasn’t raised in space. Luna.”

Ignazio nodded. “Earth for me, till the war ended and Mom brought us up to join her with the Fleet.”

Timeon grinned. “Playing videogames all through a wasted childhood on the Ilha do Fogo.”

Dabeet was genuinely surprised. “You’ve got as much dirt under your nails as I do.”

“It’s Ragnar and me,” said Monkey, “and I think we need to see the setup.”

“Right,” said Ragnar.

“Nobody guarding it?” asked Bartolomeo. “I grew up in Macau, by the way. Dirty feet, too.”

“None of us is even close to grown up,” Zhang He reminded them.

As they swiftly made their way along corridors and down the elevator shaft, Dabeet asked the questions that were on his mind. “I thought you’d be in the thick of things,” he said to Zhang He.