Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(42)

“Why aren’t we floating, if—”

“Reduced-gee, not null-gee. You’re sticking to the floor because our uniform boots are designed to do that. In case the anti-grav equipment piffs.”

It took Dabeet a moment to realize that it was stupid of him to pretend to understand what he didn’t. “I think I got the meaning from context, but … ‘piffs’?”

“We lived in a Portuguese dome on Luna—they had room and took us in when my people fled China. So … separate slang. ‘Piff’ comes from ‘pifar’ which means to fall apart, fail, go blooey. English doesn’t have a good enough word.”

“So it does now,” said Dabeet. “If I’m the worst at bouncing around in low-gee, then—”

“This hold is set to lunar gravity, so that containers stay in one orientation, but they’re easier to move. They still have the same mass, so you can get crushed to death if you try to stop them by putting yourself between them and a wall. But there’s way less friction so it’s much easier to get them moving.”

“We’re not moving anything, though, right?”

“Just tallying.”

“You grew up in lunar gravity.”

“So won’t it be good for you to work out how to move in that environment?”

“If I’m busy trying to control my movements, won’t I be more likely to miss something?”

“I’ll be keeping my eye on you when you’re not actually reading labels. And I’ll be right behind you. We’ll both be making sure we don’t miss anything.”

It wasn’t a bad system, and Dabeet learned that lunar gravity was a lot easier to work with than zero-gee in the battleroom. Though there were still tricks to it.

“Don’t race up the stack so fast!” Zhang called out, and in a moment Dabeet found out why. When he reached the top container, he didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. He just flew upward, hit the ceiling, and bounced back down.

“Sorry,” said Zhang He. “I should have warned you sooner. Your momentum is based on your mass. Every kid on Luna learns that if you race up a ladder, you run out of ladder long before you run out of momentum.”

“But there’s still gravity,” said Dabeet. “Even if I hadn’t hit a ceiling I would have come back down, right?”

“Eventually. Somewhere,” said Zhang. “Nice and easy wins the race.”

It turned out that apparently all five trick items were in their ship—unless both ships had five. But Dabeet was skeptical. “Two of these ‘mistakes’ were those shallow containers stacked against the wall behind that massive one. We wouldn’t have known they were there if we hadn’t been so thorough about investigating every side of every stack.”

“True,” said Zhang He. “So they were messing with us.”

“They were hiding it from somebody,” said Dabeet. “The other three were obvious. Right out in the open. And we haven’t finished the whole inventory, so we don’t know whether we’ll still find some on the list that weren’t in the hold.”

“So you’re thinking that maybe those two hidden ones were concealed from lazy tallyboys, not a trap set to catch them.”

“Let’s finish, and then go back and look at them again.”

Zhang He agreed. But before they got to the end of the cargo bay, some men came in with drags and drones and started off-loading the cargo nearest the door.

Zhang immediately bounded along the floor—a true lunar run, Dabeet realized, having seen vids of lunar movement before—and confronted them. He could hear Zhang in his earpiece: You can’t take anything yet, we haven’t signed off on the tally, and some adult is supposed to check our work before—

“There’s always a schedule,” said one of the men, “and this happens all the time. You’re trainees, right? So you’re being stupid-careful. We don’t have time to wait for your training. You already checked everything at this end. Just keep going and we promise not to catch up with you.”

Dabeet would probably have argued. Might even have followed Zhang, much more clumsily of course, to join in the discussion. But his body position marked the spot where their tally had stopped, so he waited till Zhang came back.

“You couldn’t see his face from here,” Zhang explained. “He sounded nice enough, but his face said for me to back off or we’d be the first cargo they off-loaded.”

“So we keep at it,” said Dabeet. “Because this is how the world works.”

“Nothing is done by the book, ever. You just pretend not to see it.”

It didn’t take long to finish, but as they made their way to the door they realized that the stevedores had been moving cargo faster than the tallyboys could count it. If Dabeet and Zhang hadn’t had such a head start, they would have had to count the last containers as they were being removed.

“What do you want to bet,” said Zhang, “that a lot of tallies are made standing at the door, watching it all get loaded off.”

“What I bet,” said Dabeet, “is that a lot of tallies are made in the office without the tallyboy ever looking at the shipping containers or checking the labels.”

“But not in the IF,” said Zhang with a grin. “And certainly not at Fleet School.”