Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(39)
Only as he saw the suited-up outside team pass the doorway to the office where Dabeet, Zhang, and a couple of others were getting an explanation of how bills of lading worked did it occur to Dabeet that if he was actually going to do what his South American masters demanded in order to keep them from harming Mother, he would have to know how to do real work while wearing a spacesuit. That was a skill that had never come up in a class at Conn. There was a space club, but they worked with telescopes and had no field trips even to the Moon. Dabeet’s job, though, was to open a door and leave it open. Since that would lead to instant evacuation of atmosphere from whatever room he was in, there was no way to do that without a spacesuit. And he had no idea where the spacesuits were kept, what it took to get one, and how to put it on and use it even if he had one.
More to the point, every aperture in the Fleet School space station was electronically monitored. Every door—into barracks, into closets, into classrooms, into restrooms—reported its status to a central security system, which kept a record of it. How could he open a door without its being detected, closed, and then rigged with better security so it wouldn’t happen again?
For that matter, every door already knew the identity of the person who approached it. They had palmpads beside them, but nobody ever had to use them because the door knew you were coming and, if you were authorized, slid open so you could pass through it. So even if Dabeet found an outside door he could mechanically open himself, the system would surely know that he was the one who was there opening it.
Dabeet wondered: How do they track us? We didn’t get any implants—unless one of those injections before we launched actually put some kind of nano-ID into my body. Not likely. It’s probably our clothing. Simple test: Try to get out of the barracks naked. But that’s the other problem. Anything I do to defeat the door security system will keep me from leaving the barracks.
Anything I do will raise questions. Questions will get back to the commandant. And Urska Kaluza is not my friend.
If I can’t do it, I can’t do it. Didn’t any of these security problems occur to the general or at least one of his brighter minions? Why did they think a child would have the ability to do anything, especially breach the exterior of a space station without its being noticed?
Dabeet could imagine the general’s response. “You took the tests. They show you are very smart and resourceful. Find a way.”
Whether or not Dabeet really believed Graff’s story about Mother not having any genetic connection to him did not change the fact that she had spent his whole lifetime taking care of him, sacrificing whatever else she might have done with her life. With due candor, Dabeet recognized that he had not been an affectionate child—what reward had she received? She certainly did not deserve whatever the general would do to her if Dabeet failed to deliver on his promise.
Yet fail he would, fail he must. Children here were prisoners, not in status but in fact. Safety considerations alone would dictate that the one group that could not be given access to any passage into hard space was the students. Since bright kids—no, sane kids—would never try to open a door into space, there hadn’t been any warnings. There weren’t warnings issued about not drinking cleaning fluids or eating random medicines or sticking sharp objects into your eyes or ears, unless you counted what was printed on the containers. It was assumed that any kid who made it into Fleet School would have a healthy respect for the vacuum of space.
Dabeet imagined himself opening an outside door and then getting swept out into space with the rush of evacuating air. Nobody would be able to find him before he was long dead. Eventually, if he didn’t plummet to Earth and burn up on reentry, somebody would run across his body. “Ah, a Fleet School student who was too dumb to graduate.”
Rafa Ochoa deserved his loyalty. But he could not do what could not be done.
“I don’t think you’re paying attention, young man,” said the accountant who was lecturing them.
Dabeet gave him a dead-eyed look and proceeded to continue the man’s explanation from the point where he had left off to annoy Dabeet. The accountant’s eyes widened. “I haven’t gotten to that part yet,” he said.
“While you were talking, what did we have to do but read ahead? Why give us these papers if you’re just going to recite them aloud? Why not give us hands-on practice so you can see how well we understand?”
“We have a tried-and-true method of—”
“Of boring your trainees while preventing them from learning. Anyone who doesn’t get it needs specific answers to the problems they have in working with the records. For instance, who makes sure that the items listed on the bill of lading are actually what the bill says they are?”
“People who aren’t you,” said the accountant.
Dabeet’s guess was that the accountant had never thought of that question and had no idea of the answer. “So you look at the list, someone tells you—orally? on another list?—that all the items are here and have been sent to the right place, and—”
“I hope it’s you doing the tally,” said the accountant. “That would explain why they’re using children for a serious job. You can crawl around among the shipping containers and check the numbers against the bill.”
“So it’s all shipping containers. The bill of lading says, ‘Paper diapers for space babies,’ but nobody ever opens the airtight container to make sure it isn’t explosives or dehydrated dogs or military robots?”