Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(45)

—It brought you Dabeet.

—We’ve had Dabeet all along.

—What for? What do you see him for?

—Well, as Dabeet himself pointed out, we’re not quite sure the Formic Wars are over. Now or three thousand years from now, the hive queens may suddenly burst upon the scene again, but this time much better armed and better prepared to take us on.

—I’ve watched Ender Wiggin and Bean and the whole jeesh, and I’ve seen no sign that Dabeet could ever have been fit to take part in that.

—I don’t think Dabeet is a candidate to replace Ender Wiggin, should we ever need such a commander again, which I doubt.

—Then why do you indulge this arrogant child?

—Because someday we’ll need a replacement for … well … me.

—I’ve read your file, sir. Your own test scores are not in the league of any of these children.

—We’ve known for a couple of centuries, at least, that great achievement—and yes, I know perfectly well that my achievements have changed the world—great achievement is not the result of inborn talent. It’s about persistence. Courage. Measured self-regard.

—Dabeet has no shortage of self-regard.

—But the measurement has only just begun.

—And we have to give the boy credit for persistence.

—Relentlessness.

—But courage, now.

—All things in their time. He doesn’t realize it, but he’s in a dangerous place. So we’ll see.

—So should I arrange your schedule to give him this meeting?

—It can’t be by ansible. That would show Kaluza way too much about the importance I attach to the boy. I have to drop in for a sudden inspection, and then happen to bump into Dabeet. Kaluza will be certain that my visit is about her, so she’ll think nothing of my incidental contacts with others.

—How urgent is this?

—Keep me within a shuttle trip of Fleet School. Earth or Luna or nearby space stations. Give no sign that I have my eye on Fleet School. Then, when I give the word, I want my arrival at Fleet School to be limited only by the physics of space travel.

—Are you going to answer the letter?

—Heavens no! And make the boy think that I care?

To Dabeet’s surprise, other children began gathering with him and Zhang He in the battleroom. At first each newcomer would observe what they did. Some of them would then go off and start pulling cubes out of the walls. Some drew out only a few; others began a few small constructions and then drifted a meter or two away and looked at what they had built with apparent satisfaction.

Only a very few remained to listen as Dabeet and Zhang He talked through what they were doing. Their vision was to use pillar construction during an actual battle, and that demanded planning, speed, and a clear division of labor. Using the stopwatch function on their suits, each one timed the other on the basic tasks, then critiqued what they had seen.

“You’re trying to move too quickly to start putting the pillars in place,” Zhang He told Dabeet. “It isn’t solid yet when you start moving it around, and so what you bring to the structure is still a kind of noodle, far too flexible. So you end up doing the solidifying twists again, on site, where it’s much harder and more time-consuming to do it.”

“So slower is faster,” said Dabeet.

“That’s just stupid. Slower is slower,” said Zhang He. “It’s finishing the job before you move on that will make a difference.”

So Dabeet made sure each four-cube pillar was solid before he unlocked it from the wall and took it to the place where he needed to lock it in place to advance the structure.

The few kids who listened to them critiquing each other, or laying out the order of construction and assignment of jobs, didn’t go off by themselves to try out this weird activity. Instead, each one in turn would come up to Dabeet or Zhang and ask if they could try.

“Of course,” said Zhang He. “There’s a lot of wall.”

But Dabeet knew what they were really asking. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll watch you and tell you what you’re doing wrong, till you get it right.”

Soon Zhang picked up the same habit. Four kids went through this process and began to show some skill in pillar construction. In fact, it became a game, to start them all at the same moment, time them, and see who could finish first.

But one of the boys, Ignazio Cabeza, shrugged off the race. “I don’t care if I’m faster or slower than them. I want to know if I’m improving over how fast I was before.” And soon Dabeet stopped the competitive heats and turned to stopwatching each trainee in turn.

After a week of working with this new team, Zhang He teased Dabeet at lunch. “I thought you were the anti-social one, and here you brought these new guys in so deep that now we’re hardly getting any practice time for ourselves.”

“Aren’t you learning from what they do?” asked Dabeet.

“We’re all learning this useless set of skills, Dabeet,” said Zhang He. “If this ever becomes a zero-gee Olympic event, we’ll win. My point is that I don’t get why you give up so much of your own time to help them.”

“Because the six of us might conceivably build a structure quickly enough to be of use in an actual battle. The chance of just you and me doing it is pretty remote.”