Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(43)

“Where honor and integrity reign supreme.”

They checked the bill of lading and found two missing items that hadn’t been in the tally.

“So that’s five,” said Dabeet. “The three obvious extras, and the two that were missing.”

“Then that’s seven,” said Zhang.

They were still in the loading dock, as the last items, hanging from drones, were being pulled by drags out of the ship.

“Unless the two hidden ones were the two on the bill that we didn’t find.”

“Different numbers,” said Zhang He. “Different numbering system. Not the IF’s standard codes, so … maybe not from a legitimate Fleet inspector?”

“Let’s step out of here,” said Dabeet. He didn’t like the way the stevedores kept looking over at them.

“Shouldn’t we look for those two shallow containers?” asked Zhang He.

“So let’s say it’s contraband. Either it won’t be here and they’ll deny ever seeing it, or it will be here and they’ll have to put us out into space through a door in the ship,” said Dabeet.

“So we leave this room and never know?” asked Zhang He.

“We know what we know,” said Dabeet. “We’re not doing anything that might risk our lives.”

Zhang He suddenly grinned and whooped, then lifted up Dabeet’s hand and slapped it.

“What are you…”

Dabeet saw that the stevedores had stopped their work. Zhang He turned to them and shouted. “We caught all five errors the teachers set for us! Done!”

In a moment they were in the corridors, heading back to the conference room they had started from. But as they were turning to go, Dabeet saw that the stevedores had turned back to their work without pausing for even a moment’s thought. Having trainees do the tally at Fleet School might be new, but as long as the stevedores thought of them as exuberant children, they’d be in no danger.

“Good job,” said Dabeet. “They’ve written us off as kids.”

“Still wish we could have double-checked those two extras,” said Zhang.

“We checked them thoroughly. We saw every side of them. There was no second label.”

“We didn’t see the front and back at a good angle,” said Zhang. “If those two containers have disappeared, they’ll never believe we found anything at all.”

“If they’ve disappeared,” said Dabeet, “then we know something corrupt is happening here. So we don’t want to make a big deal of it.”

“If they only left us five errors, and we found seven…”

“Then they’ll make a big deal about it. See? If they don’t already know about those two hidden ones, and they can’t find them now, they’ll want to claim we were lying, they’ll say we failed the test, that we made stuff up. Do you care?”

Zhang He smiled a little. “é, I do. I don’t like failing when I didn’t fail.”

“Neither do I. But look, Zhang, either they’ll make a big deal about it or they won’t. I think they won’t. If nothing corrupt is going on, then either they left us seven mistakes, and we found them all, or they left us five deliberate mistakes, and a couple were genuine mistakes and they go looking for the extras and they find them and hey, we did good work.”

“But if they don’t find them…”

“If they don’t find them, then something hinky is going on. If the brass here don’t know about it, they call us in, make sure we stand by our story and that both of us agree on what we saw. Then they launch an investigation that we children of the Fleet never hear about. Or the brass is in on the scam, in which case they know we saw what we say we saw, but they never ask us about it at all, because they know that for all we know, they set all seven traps for us. So unless they bring it up, we won’t think any more of it. It just disappears because, you know, we’re children.”

“So we don’t even point out the difference in labeling.”

“We act as if we think it’s just one of their traps unless they ask about it. Then they’re really investigating, and we tell everything we know, including that they were off-loaded while we were finishing our tally.”

“Otherwise, we found seven mistakes when they said there’d be five, so aren’t they tricky.”

“And come on, Zhang. If there is something corrupt, how likely is it that they’d assign us to a ship carrying contraband?”

Zhang smiled. “Nobody planned this,” he said. “This has all the markers of improvisation. Badly planned, ill-prepared teachers, letting us hijack their process—and the people carrying out this new program might not know anything about the smuggling operation, if there is one, and if those two containers were part of it.”

“I still remember those lading numbers,” said Dabeet. “But you’re the only person I’m going to admit that to.”

“Good idea.”

“And I’m not going to do a search for those numbers to see what the system thinks they are or where they’re from.”

“You’re not?”

“Not for a few weeks,” said Dabeet.

“If you write them down, they’ll find them in your desk.”