Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(59)

Bleary-eyed and frustrated, Dabeet set down his desk and pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes. What if the message was urgent? What if they were already on the way and the message was “open the doors now”?

Their own fault if they were too dumb to make the cipher breakable.

“How long have you been awake?”

Dabeet opened his eyes. Bartolomeo Ja was standing there by his bunk. The other kids were still asleep, but commanders were always wakened fifteen minutes before regular soldiers.

“A while,” said Dabeet. “Running a problem that was keeping me awake.”

“You look bleary-eyed and ragged,” said Ja. “How stupid are you?”

At first Dabeet took that to be a mean-spirited criticism, but his momentary anger was quickly defused.

“That came out wrong,” said Ja. “What I mean is, how sleep-deprived are you? We have a battle, and if the conditions are right I want to battle-test your wall. But not if you’re sleepy and slow.”

“Doesn’t matter if I am,” said Dabeet. “The others will be sharp enough, and if I’m a little slow it won’t matter because we can continue assembling it in flight.”

“I’ll take your word for it. My experience is that a tired soldier is a dead soldier.”

“If I die, I die,” said Dabeet.

“I know, it’s only a game,” said Ja as he walked away.

The battleroom had stars in the eight corners but nothing right up the middle. Dabeet’s original wall would have had trouble forming up between those stars, but the scaled-down version was easy to maneuver. Dabeet was a little clumsier than usual, but they had practiced the assembly so much that he could almost do his part in his sleep—which is pretty much what he did.

Ja formed the rest of the army behind the wall before it was finished. They had practiced doing that, making sure not to get in the way of the builders, who had to mine the fixed wall in order to get the building blocks of the mobile wall. The structure was in motion half-built, but it moved slowly enough that Dabeet’s newly expanded team could still pick up the last blocks, build them into three-by-three panels, and put them in place.

“Fire through the breaks,” Ja reminded them. “Use your cover. But whatever you do, don’t let them get edge-on to the wall, or we’ve got no place to hide.”

They knew it, of course they knew it, but this was the first real test in a game, and if this whole structure-building thing was to get a fair test, they couldn’t make mistakes.

They made mistakes, because Homo sapiens is not always sapient. But they adapted and recovered from their mistakes, and the battle ended with an overwhelming victory before the mobile wall was halfway across the battleroom. It was Odd Oddson who emerged from the teacher door and congratulated them, talking over the objections from the opponents, whose recriminations included words like “cheat” and “unfair” and “not what we trained for.”

Oddson was amused by that last one. “The enemy that beats you is always the one who does something you didn’t train for.”

“We didn’t get any building blocks!” one of them said.

Which led Oddson to invite Ja to demonstrate how the blocks were pulled out of the wall. Ja admitted he had never done it himself, so he called for the block squad to come demonstrate. Both armies gathered around to watch—including Dabeet, who was so exhausted by now that he was afraid he’d make hash of the demonstration.

Without saying anything, without delegating, he by default turned it over to Zhang He, who did an excellent job of showing how the wall panels could be pulled out to four blocks high, or separated into four individual blocks. Clear explanations, in very few words, as if he had written out the instructions and rehearsed them. Maybe he had.

They took another fifteen minutes in the battleroom for everybody to try pulling out blocks. Dabeet understood why Oddson allowed it—now that building something with blocks had won a decisive victory, every army would have to develop what amounted to a construction brigade.

While the others were playing, Zhang He came over to Dabeet. “What was that about?” he asked, looking annoyed.

Dabeet didn’t know what he was talking about.

“Making me do the demonstration. People will think I’m the expert.”

“You’re as expert as I am. And today, much more expert.”

“What do you mean, today?”

“I didn’t sleep last night.”

Zhang regarded him for a few moments. “Ja said you woke up early. Do you mean you never slept?”

“Working on a problem, time got away from me.”

“Then things went pretty well today. I thought you were just testing us by not giving us any instructions or supervising us in any way.”

“I don’t usually, now that everybody knows what they’re doing.”

“But you’re usually watching, so you can call out if one person’s lagging or somebody else is doing careless work.”

“Today it was all I could do to watch my own work and get it done.”

Zhang He squinted at him. “What are you lying about?”

“Not lying.”

That wasn’t good enough for Zhang.

“Don’t give me that San Tomás the Skeptic look,” said Dabeet. “What’s there to lie about?”