Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(34)

No sooner thought of than he had to try it, so Dabeet spent half the practice extruding boxes and building them up in a single rigid pillar that came to a stop exactly half a box-width away from the star, and not quite aligned with it.

Dabeet took the handhold of the square nearest his pillar’s end, drawing it up from the surface of the star. He had only brought it half the distance to the end of his pillar when something shifted.

The star shifted. The whole star moved away from the pillar and sideways exactly the right amount to allow the box he was now extruding to line up perfectly with the end of the pillar.

Dabeet snaked his hand out from between the new cube and the pillar. They could hardly connect as long as he still had a body part involved.

As soon as his hand was clear, the new cube from the star finished extruding itself and snapped into place on the pillar. The star was now anchored to the wall by a long, inflexible tether.

The star had moved to make this happen. The cube had self-extruded in order to bridge the last gap. The blocks had locked together without his having to flip any lever or adjust anything at all. Clearly, the star had sensed his design and cooperated. Or, rather, the computer program controlling the behavior of the wall units had helped him achieve his goal.

The only possible conclusion was that the blocks had been designed with this exact process in mind. Bring wall blocks close enough to star blocks, and everything will self-adjust in order to fit.

“OK, that’s amazing,” said a boy.

It was Zhang He, who was rumored to be from the powerful Wu-Hu trading clan, a family both Great and Brave. This had been interesting enough that Dabeet had looked up his background, which revealed that Zhang He wasn’t from a Miner clan. He was a True Child of the Fleet, and his family were Onlookers, stationed on Luna during the war. This information was part of his public bio, so Dabeet couldn’t conceive of how the rumor of the Wu-Hu connection could have started.

“Glad you’re amazed,” said Dabeet. Then, hearing his own voice, he realized that this could probably be taken as sarcasm, so he added, “It amazed me, too.”

“Did I see the star move?”

“I felt it and saw it,” said Dabeet. “It moved.”

“Eppur si muove,” said Zhang He. The words that Galileo reputedly said after the Inquisition forced him to confess that the Earth does not move around the Sun; that it does not move at all. “And yet it moves,” the great astronomer supposedly muttered.

Dabeet chuckled. “Not sure the discovery reaches Galileo’s level.”

“Good enough for the battleroom,” said Zhang.

“I wish I’d timed how long it took me to build this pillar and connect it up,” said Dabeet.

“You did time it,” said Zhang. “You’re wearing a flash suit. It times everything you do while you’re wearing it.”

Dabeet made an elaborate shrug, twisting his hands to show that if he was timed, he didn’t know where to find the data.

Unfortunately, in making this gesture he drifted away from the star. He realized his plight almost immediately, and flashed out a hand to try to take hold. He was already just a hair too far away from a handhold—and the movement caused him to spin so that in a moment his feet were coming up and his hands were even farther from the nearest grip.

Zhang He caught him by the ankle and pulled him back to the pillar. “Happens to all of us,” he said.

Dabeet smiled slightly at the attempt to salve his pride. “Thanks for saving me from a long slow trip to the far wall.”

“Pull the back of your glove—either glove—up to your mouth, whisper your question, and then look at the glove.”

Holding tightly to the handhold, Dabeet asked his other hand, “How long did it take me to build this pillar and connect it to the star?”

The back of his glove lit up with easily readable characters: “14:32.”

“I hope that’s minutes and seconds,” said Dabeet.

“Still a long time,” said Zhang He. “Longer than most battles.”

So … still useless.

Unless somebody would help him. Learn how to create and manipulate the blocks as quickly as Dabeet did. Learn how to be his partner in this insane project.

Dabeet did not dare to ask. Zhang He was showing himself to have good will toward Dabeet, to be interested in what he was doing. But to ask one of the top soldiers in the team to apprentice himself to the lowest of the low, that might easily be an insult.

“What if we did it together?” asked Zhang He. “Would I be a help or would I just get in the way.”

“You’d probably get in the way at first,” said Dabeet, “and then be a great help as soon as you got skilled at extruding these cubic bubbles from the wall and sticking them together.”

“I know,” said Zhang He. “I’m a top soldier and you’re kind of nothing, so people will say stupid things and some of them will get mad if I spend time doing this with you. I assume you’ve already taken enough shit to know how to ignore it?”

“I have,” said Dabeet. “But have you?”

“I have to listen to them calling me Wu-Hu all the time, just to point up the shameful fact that my parents were both stationed on Luna during the war.”

“How is it shameful to be a True Child of the Fleet?”