Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(65)
Surely some of that mindset would have been involved in planning the Lagrange-point stations. Where was all that material? Air moved through the ductwork into every room; what was pushing that air? Where was it located? Solar power was wired into every room’s lights and wall heating panels. Where were the power cables and the fiber optics? Of course they were in the walls and floors … but nobody would build such a system in space without creating complete access to every centimeter, so that nobody would have to tear out walls to get to the wiring, the piping, the air ducts.
I’m missing something, thought Dabeet, just like when I was trying to decipher the message. Only now I can’t explain it to Zhang He, because he and I aren’t talking all that much and I don’t know how he’ll react if he knows my mission.
The one positive outcome, so far, was this: Nobody had interfered with his wandering or asked him what business he had on teacher-only levels, or in corridors far from his own army’s barracks. That might mean that he was not being tracked, or it might mean that they knew he was wandering around and didn’t care.
Or it might mean that Urska Kaluza was secretly allied with the raiders and wanted him to obey their instructions. Therefore, she wouldn’t allow anyone to interfere with him. Or it might mean that the security people were monitoring him very carefully, waiting to catch him in an overt act that would allow them to expel him from Fleet School.
Expel him from Fleet School? That would be the most elegant solution, wouldn’t it! If they sent him back to Earth, he couldn’t obey his orders. He’d be valueless to them through no fault of his own.
Unless they assumed, correctly, that he planned to get expelled and punished him—directly, or by hurting his mother.
I don’t know enough to decide anything, he realized.
He found himself that day in the game room, which was full of kids competing in multi-player games or locking horns with the solo machines. There were stories about how Ender Wiggin had first made a splash at Battle School by beating older boys on these machines, but Dabeet found it hard to believe that somebody as smart as Ender would waste time on children’s games.
Yet he needed to empty his head in the hope that his unconscious mind would bring out some useful idea.
The human brain was such a design nightmare, cobbled together from repurposed parts. What use was it to have his most productive thinking take place at a level where his conscious mind was unaware of it and incapable of retrieving it? Why couldn’t it all happen where he could see it?
His reflexes quickly adapted to each game he tried; once he caught the movement patterns required to get past the obstacle, the game became boring. Maybe being bored with what his hands were doing was part of “emptying” his mind, but it didn’t matter. He had to quit and move on to another game.
He went from game to game till he was in a back corner, where the less popular games were set up. He didn’t want to play those games, either—they must have had these things installed for the days when they had younger kids in the school. He almost turned away to head back to the other games, or maybe he’d just head on out of the game room and go back to exploring and finding nothing. Except that he noticed there was an air intake down near the floor, in a spot where the view was blocked by the unused games.
There were air ducts everywhere in the station, but most of them were up high. There were a couple of them in the barracks, but there would be no way to examine them without attracting unwanted attention from the other students. This one, though, was down low, completely accessible, mostly out of sight.
Dabeet walked over and squatted to examine it. The grillwork framing and covering the duct looked as if it had been designed to come away from the wall rather easily, but it had been retrofitted with some clamps that attached to something on the other side of the wall. There would be no pulling it away.
There was no reason for that level of security unless someone had once used exactly this access point, and the station administrators were determined that no one would be able to do so again. Whatever the purpose for going into the ducts—sabotage? spying? hiding his collection of marbles?—it must have annoyed somebody.
It must have been a very small person who went into this duct. Even if the grill had not been permanently fixed in place, Dabeet was already too old, too big to get in there, or accomplish anything if he did.
“They say it was Bean.”
Dabeet whirled so fast he lost his balance and had to catch himself with one hand to keep from toppling over from his squatting position.
It was Monkey—Cynthia Munk—the smallest and youngest of his squad of block-builders.
Before he could reply with the obvious question, Monkey answered it. “Legendary, I know. All the weird stories in this place seem to be ascribed to Bean.”
“Bean is a name? A person?” It was something Dabeet had never quite believed.
“The smallest student ever admitted to Battle School, they say. Youngest. With test scores better than Ender Wiggin’s.”
Now Dabeet remembered having heard of Bean—in the context of test scores. His were the only benchmarks Dabeet had not surpassed. But when he saw “Bean” at the top of all the listings, he assumed it was a statistical term representing some kind of optimum.
“They emptied all the kids out of Battle School before they set up Fleet School,” said Dabeet. “So how could Battle School kids pass on a legend to Fleet School?”