Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(24)
As the cargo vessel docked with Fleet School, that was the meditative trance that Dabeet put himself into. And what emerged from it was this:
The IF did not know that Ender Wiggin and his jeesh would be so spectacularly successful in their invasion of the Formic worlds. Every enemy fleet destroyed, then the home world itself blown to bits and every hive queen with it. For all the IF high command knew, at least one Formic world might have survived, and therefore a new invasion of Earth was likely. Also, it was possible that a Formic fleet had embarked forty years before and would enter the solar system ten years after the human invasion of the Formic worlds was over.
This still might happen. There might yet be a Fourth Formic War.
So why, then, did they dismantle Battle School and replace it with a school whose purpose was colonization and exploration?
It was a good strategy, in the long term, because the human race could never again afford to be caught clinging to only one planet, whose destruction would mean the end of our species. Graff was probably quite sincere in that policy, that in the long run the protection of the human race depended on dispersal rather than fortification.
And maybe they had information Dabeet could not know, that affirmed there would be no Formic invasion fleet popping up at near lightspeed at the fringes of the solar system. In that case the closing of Battle School made sense. So did the International Fleet’s unhooking itself from the Hegemony, so they were no longer dependent on or obedient to any Earthbound institution.
But all those decisions were reached after Ender Wiggin’s victory. Until that moment, the IF had to be planning for a much longer war, for a struggle at least as epic as the one between Rome and Carthage, a back-and-forth, ever-escalating struggle to the death with a resourceful and implacable enemy.
They would need commanders even smarter than Ender Wiggin and his brilliant jeesh. That meant that Graff and the IF high command would have already set in motion plans to get those commanders.
What part did I play in those plans?
The docking was complete. The cargo vessel was entirely inside a docking bay—they were designed for each other, and for every other ordinary null-gee cargo bay throughout the solar system. The artificial gravity had kicked in; there was an audible sigh of relief from those suffering from nausea. Now it was time to unfasten seat belts and set foot again on a floor that knew it was a floor, and not a wall or ceiling.
Stepping out through the door onto a gangway, Dabeet held tightly to the railing on his right so that he could free his eyes to take in the surrounding area. The cargo vessel was a snug enough fit, and now conveyor belts were taking cargo from the ship into the bowels of the Fleet School space station. Dabeet wanted to follow the cargo and see how it was dispersed and stowed, but a cough from behind him reminded him that he was supposed to be moving forward down the gangway.
Waiting at the foot of the ramp was a tall blond lieutenant—Dabeet had memorized all the insignias of the IF—who introduced himself as Odd Oddson. “And yes,” the lieutenant continued, “my parents were singularly uncreative, and I know that it makes an amusing pun in English.”
“I hope you’ll explain it to me sometime, sir,” said Dabeet.
Odd looked at him a bit askance, but then grinned. “A dry sense of humor is unusual among the children, Mr. Ochoa. But not unwelcome, or at least not to me. In the old days, you would have arrived with a squad of greenies, and I would have led you to your new barracks. These are less formal times, and nobody comes from Earth, so we have no ordinary ritual for receiving you.”
“I’m glad you were kind enough to meet me, sir,” said Dabeet.
“I was assigned, so the kindness all came from Commandant Urska Kaluza.”
Dabeet instantly made the associations. “A Slovene name,” he said. “Urska is short for Ursula—does she really use her nickname?”
“She is addressed as Commandant and Sir,” said Oddson. “By you, at least. Colonel Kaluza by those of high enough rank to address her by name rather than office.”
“I wouldn’t dream of informality, sir,” said Dabeet. “At least not without invitation.”
“It will never come, I promise you,” said Oddson. “And now you’ll get a chance to practice all your courtesies, because she wanted to meet you upon arrival. Follow me.”
Dabeet hadn’t been in such a complex three-dimensional structure in his life. Planetside buildings tended toward rectangles, and floors were level. Here, the main corridors ran around the wheel of the space station, with the outer surface of the wheel forming the floor. Dabeet was sure this must be a holdover from the earliest days of space colonization, when a kind of pseudo-gravity was achieved by spinning the whole station, so that centrifugal force would make a kind of “down” for the inhabitants.
But artificial gravity had been around since the days of Ukko Jukes, and now a complex set of computations kept real gravity very nearly balanced throughout the station, except in the battleroom cubes at the center. That central placement would have made them effectively weightless when they were first built; now they were sealed off from all gravity so that the battlerooms had no heavy or light spots, and objects flew straight from one side to the other. Again, Dabeet’s pre-voyage study made it unnecessary for him to ask questions.
Nor was Dabeet feeling chatty. Instead of commenting on what he saw during the trip from deck to deck, from spoke to spoke of the wheel, he filed everything away, along with excellent estimates of the distances involved, as he began to construct his internal map of Fleet School. Already he knew just how far it was when the upward curve of the long corridors made the feet of someone moving away from him disappear. As he grew taller, that distance would change.