Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(63)

“You don’t know if you can trust me.”

“I don’t know if it would put you in danger to know.”

Zhang gave a short nasty laugh. “I see, we’re playing at spies. Glad I could help.” Zhang walked languidly away.

Why didn’t I just say yes? I could have changed my mind later, with an explanation. Or told him that I never figured it out. Instead I’ve offended him, which loses me the only offer of help I’m likely to get.

And what did he mean, “playing at spies.” The cipher was real. Dabeet really was working on it all night. Why would Zhang help him, then dismiss the whole project as worthless? Who is Zhang to me? My only friend? Or the person who despises me most?

Yet I’m going to need somebody. I could use a second pair of hands, of feet. Somebody to run the airlock while I … no, stupid, Zhang doesn’t have any more access to the system than I do, it won’t obey students. But something. I have to do something in order to save Mother and …

Why am I valuing her above all the students here? Because her death is a sure thing if I fail, while the raid isn’t supposed to kill anybody, or at least not any of the kids. Sure death versus a hard couple of days, maybe only hours? That’s when the life of the one is more important than the convenience of the many. Right?

You’re not in control of this, Dabeet. You can’t predict any outcomes. You have to take action, or not take it, based on other criteria.

Dabeet woke up from a doze and realized it would take him three times as long to decipher the puzzle if he tried to do it now, without sleeping. He saved the bifurcated puzzle and lay down on the bed. He’d miss lunch. So what. Nap first.

Two thoughts just as he was drifting off.

I wonder if I got credit for creating the floating wall in the conversations about it all over the ship.

And when I was remonstrating with myself—“You’re not in control of this, Dabeet”—it wasn’t my own voice I imagined speaking to me. It was MinCol’s.





12

From Spanish: your message received door must be in new unfinished sector open eighteen october lunar eight pm no atmo needed

From English: if defensive force ambushes us your mother is dead within half hour if our all clear not sent every half hour be smart

Once Dabeet tried Zhang He’s idea, everything fell into place. The messages read, with alternating letters, from bottom to top, from right to left. The upper left corner contained sixteen letters of Spanish only, since the Spanish message took more letters than the English one. The weirdest thing was “atmo” because that just wasn’t a Spanish word. But their phrasing and spelling must have been shaped by the exact number of letters that would fit into a perfect puzzle square.

Not a hard cipher at all, once Zhang He had come up with the key. But Dabeet had needed that key, so without Zhang’s help he might have been pounding his head into the problem till the deadline passed.

More than a month away, though. And since all the near-Earth stations and depots used Lunar Time, which was tied to Eastern Standard Time in the United States, there would be no problem getting the time right. They had used the English expression “pm” in the Spanish section, because any Latin American or soldier would have written the time using the twenty-four-hour system: two thousand or twenty hundred hours. “Ocho pm” took up the same number of characters as “dos mil,” but they probably expected Dabeet to think like an American, even in the Spanish section.

So his job was to be door-opening again. Only this time, the head of station security would not be giving him a free pass into the unfinished part of the station, and would not be opening an airlock for him. Dabeet now faced a much harder puzzle than the cipher had been—how to get past the tracking system, so he could get where he needed to go without setting off an alarm, and then how to get an airlock to obey his unauthorized hand on the command plate.

Dabeet had already tried to hack his way into the computer system. He did it so easily that he knew at once the system was designed to be hacked—which meant that it wasn’t the real system. Instead, everything the students accessed was part of a virtual machine completely firewalled from the real station operating system. There would be no way to get from inside the student system to the real station system, because nobody with any authority would ever need to access anything from a student desk.

To sign on to the real system would supposedly require having a teacher’s fingerprint and knowing a password. But that was only true, Dabeet knew, if all the teachers followed security protocol all the time. It took careful and constant observation, but within three days Dabeet had a chance to use a teacher’s computer for a few minutes when the teacher stepped away without logging off. What Dabeet quickly discovered was that the teachers operated inside yet another virtual system; they could do way more things than the students could, but the teachers, too, were shut out of real station operations.

This made sense. The last thing the station needed was to let any idiot reset a thermostat or open some outside airlock door. But since Dabeet was exactly the idiot they were trying to keep out, this became a serious matter. The countdown was running, and he still had no idea how to fulfil his assignment.

So maybe I don’t fulfil it. What do these clowns expect? I’m a kid in a place designed specifically to contain really bright kids. He couldn’t find any forgotten back doors because there had never been any paths from the virtual operating systems to the real one. If there was no solution to the problem, then the South Americans would be jaunting into space for nothing.