Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(64)
And Mother would die.
Was there some way to tell them he couldn’t get the door open?
Yes. He could have failed to get the door open the first time. But he didn’t fail. He got it open. They had no way of knowing he couldn’t use the same method twice.
Meanwhile, classes went on, and Dabeet found himself struggling to pay attention, which meant he made a few mistakes here and there. Nothing out of the ordinary for an ordinary student, but two different teachers took Dabeet aside to ask him what was wrong. Nothing was wrong, of course. But to silence them, he smiled wanly and said, “I miss my mother.” Did he want to talk about it? “Talking about it makes it worse. But thanks.”
Apparently, if you tell the exact lie that they want to hear, they’ll believe you without your having to make even the slightest effort at acting. Dabeet suspected that the flatter his voice while saying these emotional things, the more believable he seemed. And also the more seriously they took his rejection of them as counselors. No doubt they talked among themselves about how Dabeet was suddenly going through a crisis of homesickness, but nobody tried to talk to him. He knew it was only a matter of time before the resident shrink brought him in for sessions, but till that started, his slippage on coursework was explained to everyone’s satisfaction.
Meanwhile, Dabeet kept looking for some way to get inside the bones of the station so he might be able to find a door that could be opened mechanically, or a back way into some station administrator’s office where a real computer might allow him to create his own pathway into the system.
Since Dabeet had no access to current station blueprints, all he had to guide him was the regular map, which showed doors and rooms and corridors. He looked for gaps, for places where life-support machinery might be housed or weapons stored. But the maps were vague enough that such places could be anywhere or everywhere.
One thing he noticed was that each level of the station was proportionate to the one above and below. The top and bottom floors became quite narrow, because of the tubular shape of the station’s wheels, but on the regular-width levels, the plan was basically the same. Visit one level, you’ve seen them all.
But was that really true? Access to life support would not need to be on every level. What Dabeet needed to find was a level that had a door or ceiling access that the other levels lacked. Anything important would certainly be locked. But once he found an anomalous door in the inhabited section of the station, he could then look for the same door in the unfinished part, where perhaps the same electronic safeguards weren’t yet in place.
Wishful thinking, but it wasn’t impossible. The station had been designed for security and isolation, but nobody expected sabotage or invasion, so it was easy to say, It can wait, there’s no urgency about installing the locking system into the doors of the unfinished section.
How, though, could Dabeet explore the entire station, the finished and unfinished parts, without being tracked? He could bluff his way through questions about slippage in classroom performance, but he didn’t know how he could plausibly answer the question, “What are you doing in this area?” Especially if it came up a second or third time in the same week.
Had Robota Smirnova reactivated the tracking device in his clothing? Dabeet couldn’t be sure. She had put her hand on him several times—on his shoulder and even on his back, to propel him and steer him. But had she pressed in the exact center of his back, as she did when she turned off his tracker? Or did the tracker come back on automatically after a pause?
If his tracker was still off, then that meant nobody had noticed that he wasn’t leaving any kind of trace in the student-monitoring system. No alarm had gone off. How could he find out whether his suit was broadcasting a signal?
He went places. This meant skipping meals, or arriving just before the mess-hall doors closed, or wolfing down his food and disappearing. He cut out of a couple of physical exercise sessions, but realized that was a bad idea—he needed to be in top shape when the raiding party came, because he could not predict what strenuous actions might be required of him. So he began skipping battleroom practices.
At first he asked Bartolomeo Ja’s permission, but Ja’s response was so indifferent—or even annoyed at the interruption—that Dabeet got the clear impression that Ja didn’t care what Dabeet did. Ever since Dabeet stepped aside to let Zhang He demonstrate the techniques involved in building with wall blocks, Zhang had become the de facto leader of the block squad. When Dabeet did show up, he was reduced to asking, “What are we building?” or “What should I do?” because it was Zhang who was planning new structures.
Dabeet was human—he felt a stab of resentment more than once, that nobody thought he was essential or even valuable in an art that he had discovered and developed. But he was smart enough to realize that being inconsequential was an asset, when the most important thing he could do with his time was wander the station looking for hidden rooms and unexplained doors.
That is, it was important if there was anything to find.
It was only a couple of days before the halfway point to the deadline that Dabeet took a break to reassess his plans. The results weren’t nothing; he may not have found anything, but he had toured every corridor available to students in the inhabited section and ascertained that there were no unexplained doors or gaps between rooms that might be filled with a service corridor or storage room.
This in itself was strange, he knew, because he had absorbed enough of spacer culture and lore from overhearing the other kids to know that even corporate and Fleet ships and stations always carried spare parts. Spare everything, because if something went wrong there was no time to order something from a warehouse and wait for it to be delivered. The goal in every Belter and Kuiper mining ship was to have on board everything needed to replace or rebuild everything on the ship, twice—and yet still have room for consumable supplies and cargo stowage.