Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(27)

“Must be a suckup,” said someone not too far away.

“Kahlua punishes suckups worst of all,” said Timeon scornfully.

“She must love him,” said a kid well back from the door.

“Commandant Kaluza loves all the children,” said Oddson.

That was greeted with snickers and hoots.

“She is deeply concerned about the happiness and well-being of every one of you,” said Oddson.

“Except this new one,” said Timeon. “This Ochoa.”

“Oh, she punished me,” said Dabeet—loudly enough to reach to the back of the barracks.

“Lying isn’t going to gain you an advantage,” said Oddson.

“The punishment was to give me no punishment, when apparently it’s the custom for every new member of a troop to somehow offend the commandant and arrive here with hours of punishment. My lack of a punishment makes you all suspicious of me.” He meant to go on, explaining, That isolates me even beyond the natural isolation of a new boy, arriving after everybody already knows everyone else. But he stopped himself, aware that his explanation wasn’t convincing anybody.

“So your punishment is to have no punishment,” said Timeon skeptically.

“What makes you so special that she singled you out like that?”

“I can’t guess at her motive,” said Dabeet. “But it might be because I’ve never been away from Earth before.”

That got everyone’s attention. “You’ve never been in null-gee before?” asked Timeon.

Dabeet shook his head, as he heard the grumbling.

“Earthsider.”

“Mudbooter.”

“You’re going to kill us in the standings,” said Timeon.

“Quite possibly,” said Dabeet. “But I’ll learn as quickly as I can. Especially if I get help.”

There was no rush to volunteer. Dabeet had thought there might be at least a few offers or reassurances. Maybe there was something in his tone of voice. Maybe he really did sound arrogant and aloof. He’d never asked other children for help before; he wasn’t good at it. Or maybe they hated Earthsiders so much that it overcame their need to get him up to speed so he didn’t “kill” them in the standings. Or maybe they were a bunch of dull bobs and he’d have to make his way through this school alone.

“New Soldier Rule,” said Oddson.

Immediately the boy on the lower bunk nearest the door got up and carried his holodesk and a small stack of clothes toward the back of the barracks.

“This is your bunk now,” said Oddson to Dabeet.

“I didn’t mean to make anybody move,” said Dabeet.

“New Soldier Rule,” said Oddson. “Weren’t you listening? Can’t you extrapolate? You need to be where you can listen to the more experienced students. Notice that the operative word here is ‘listen.’”

Dabeet was about to answer, but realized that anything he said would be speaking, and therefore would prove the aptness of Oddson’s warning. So he sat down.

“Press your hand on the back wall and your locker opens,” said Oddson. “Don’t expect any privacy here—anybody’s hand opens your locker.”

Dabeet refrained from pointing out that the word “locker” was clearly misapplied in this situation. He pressed the back wall, the locker popped open, and there was a holodesk.

“Is this mine?” he asked.

“Was it in your locker?” asked a nearby boy, his voice sarcastic enough that Dabeet got the point.

“How do I log in?” asked Dabeet.

Oddson answered before any sarcastic boys could do it. “The holodesk already knows who you are. The desks are completely interchangeable. Whatever you create on one desk will be available on any other. Anything you create will be looked at by monitoring software and, whenever they feel like it, by teachers and administrators. But no other students can read your files. That’s all the privacy you get.”

Generous, thought Dabeet. But he had had no privacy at Conn either. Until his abduction and his deal with his kidnappers, the only privacy that mattered was keeping things from Mother.

After Oddson left the barracks, Dabeet familiarized himself with his desk, but that only took a small fraction of his attention, especially since it didn’t matter yet whether he did things wrong and had to do them over. What mattered was the other boys. If he was going to make this work, he had to figure out how to work with other children. And even though Conn had been a school for the gifted, Dabeet could not be sure that Fleet School was not composed of students who were far more intelligent; perhaps a few who were Dabeet’s equals. Perhaps one, or several, or many, were cleverer than he.

After the first half hour, Dabeet reached the conclusion that if he had peers at this school, they were not in this particular barracks, though one or two showed promise. What surprised him, after having pored over the testimony and documents in the courts-martial of Graff and others who had supervised Battle School, was that these children did not seem to be obsessed with victory in the battleroom. They did not seem to form a single cohesive unit at all. They were not a team, much less an army.

Piecing together bits and pieces of information, he realized that the squad was divided into several groups. First, there were the “True Children”—the offspring of IF officers and soldiers. This group was further subdivided among the “Veterans,” who had at least one parent who was active duty in space during the war, and the “Onlookers,” whose parents were commissioned or enlisted, but stationed on Earth or Luna.