Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(68)

“I don’t know yet,” said Monkey. “I told you I wouldn’t tell anybody else, but that means that if you’re endangering the survival of the station, I’ll have to kill you myself. I really don’t want to do that.”

Dabeet almost said something boastful, like, “You’re welcome to try,” but then he realized that with his lack of agility in zero-gee—no, his lack of combat skills of any kind—she probably could kill him.

“I see that you get it,” she said. “So now, you better tell me, really specifically, what it is you need to figure out how to do.”

Dabeet nodded, but then held his silence for a long moment, trying to figure out how much he could tell her.

She started to speak but he held up a finger for silence.

And then he was ready. All his plans of telling her only bits and pieces had to be abandoned. Now that he realized how seriously Inks and Miners took the mechanicals, there was nothing he could safely tell her unless he told her everything. Except, maybe, that he sort of suggested the whole plan to the South Americans in the first place. And even then, she might not consent to helping him.

“Nothing I tell you will sound sane,” he said, “unless I tell you pretty much everything. And it’s not going to make me sound any better, except you’ll see why I have to do it. Maybe you’ll see.”

“Don’t describe what my reaction will be, because you don’t know,” said Monkey. “Just tell me what you can tell me, knowing I won’t tell anybody else.”

So Dabeet told her about the kidnapping by the South Americans, the threat against his mother, the signal using the outside doors of the station.

She listened, shaking her head, nodding gravely, all the appropriate responses as if she actually believed him—nothing like Urska Kaluza’s reaction. Of course, he hadn’t told Urska Kaluza everything. But he was pretty sure Monkey was not part of the smuggling ring, so he talked about that, too—the things that Zhang and he had found out.

Monkey grinned. “That emossen git. I mean Zhang. I can’t believe he never breathed a word about this smuggling ring to anybody.”

“If they knew that we knew, we’d be dead.”

“That is an incentive to silence,” said Monkey. “But you told Robota.”

“And I’m not dead,” said Dabeet, “so apparently I could trust her.”

“But she’s off station now.”

“Everything I’ve told you so far, she knows, mostly because she helped me give the signal. I lied to her about the reasons. About what the signal meant.”

Monkey cocked her head. “Buffering. Buffering.”

“I’m telling you.” He took a deep breath. Nothing came out of his mouth. He covered his face with his hands.

“Tell you what,” said Monkey. “I promise not to kill you for just telling me. How about that?”

“What I’m afraid of is getting you killed,” said Dabeet. “I’m afraid of getting everybody killed.” Then he shook off his dread and told her, straight out, what the South Americans told him they were going to do.

“They really think this would work?” asked Monkey. “They think they can remain anonymous so that the Fleet would have to stop all the wars on Earth in order to respond to an act of terrorism?”

“I don’t know what they really think,” said Dabeet. “There’s an old movie called The Mouse that Roared. Mother and I watched it and it was funny but not-funny. They had kind of the same plan. After World War II and the Marshall Plan—you know what that was?”

Monkey rolled her eyes. “I go to a world-class school and I’m a very good student, Dab. I get it already—some little country got the idea of invading America, losing the war, and then America would come in and occupy them and solve all their problems.”

“You guessed that?”

She shook her head. “You Americans always think the rest of the world—”

“Stop,” said Dabeet. “No sentence that begins, ‘You Americans always,’ is going to end productively.”

She grinned. “Such a patriot.”

“Not born there, but yes. We don’t want to waste time on the argument about how the Americans in the twentieth century were the most beneficent empire in history, or not. Right?”

She opened her mouth and made a sound that could have been the beginning of a “just one more thing” kind of argument, and then she closed her mouth. “So the South Americans are going to come in through a door you open and peacefully take all the children and teachers and station workers hostage. Then the Fleet will go down to Earth to straighten things out. But you’re forgetting one tiny thing.”

“The Fleet will come get their children back, and they won’t be nice about it.”

“So you didn’t forget it. Did they?”

“I don’t know what they’re thinking. They didn’t ask me for my advice and there wasn’t a question time for me to learn all about their plans.”

“There’s no way this doesn’t end ugly,” said Monkey.

“Even if they manage to take over the station without firing a shot,” said Dabeet, “what are they going to do when the Fleet sends an attack squad?”