Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(69)

“Maybe they plan to leave the station right away,” said Monkey. “Before the IF can respond. Take maybe ten or twenty kids down to Earth or Luna or some weird little space station they’ve already rented or something.”

“Nothing will work as they planned,” said Dabeet. “Because these guys are idiots. At least the ones I was kidnapped by. They could have taken me in a completely undetectable way, but instead they do it so that the cops and the principal know that I was kidnapped. The only reason it didn’t make the news is that MinCol hushed it up.”

“He knows about this?”

“I fed him a cock-and-bull story but I think he’s better at pretending to believe me than I am at lying to him.”

“You really stink at lying,” said Monkey. “It takes a lot of human interaction to work up decent lying skills.”

“I hope you teach classes in that someday soon, because that’s a survival skill I really need.”

“Oh, you’re already doing the most important thing, which is, Don’t talk. Don’t tell anybody you have a secret. Don’t tell lies, don’t tell anything at all.”

“Oh, é. I’ve got that down pretty well.”

“So you have to save your mother. If they can’t get into the station, she’s dead.”

“They say she’ll die and I don’t have any reason to doubt them.”

“So let’s say that they really mean for the station takeover to be bloodless.”

“It can’t be,” said Dabeet. “There are enough security guys in the station, not to mention teachers who are experienced soldiers, that somebody’s going to get killed.”

“And they’re dirts,” said Monkey. Then, seeing the look on his face, she explained: “Dirtbabies. People from Earth.”

“Like me,” said Dabeet.

“Oh. You weren’t puzzled, you were annoyed.”

“They’re dirts, yes. You were making some point?”

“They’re going to bring guns.”

Dabeet shrugged. “Possibly.”

“Guns, on a station with an airtight hull.”

She apparently took Dabeet’s silence as incomprehension, so she elaborated. “You fire heavy bullets inside a ship, they’re going to make holes in the walls. In the outside walls.”

Dabeet already understood, but she was enjoying the explanation so much that he played dumb a little. It was annoying how completely she bought it. “But I thought all the outside surfaces of Fleet ships were coated in nanooze, so they seal up wherever they’re breached.”

“Let’s test how efficient that is, and find out how much atmo can escape through six hundred machine-gun bullet holes before they heal over. Nanooze is like sticking your finger in the dike, it doesn’t rebuild the original surface the way Formic ships did.”

“So it’s dangerous.”

“Incredibly dangerous,” said Monkey. “Now, if they’re commanded by somebody who fought in space with the Fleet and then went back down to Earth—”

“There’s no such person in the solar system,” said Dabeet. “The only battles that were fought close enough in for the survivors to return to Earth were in the First and Second Formic Wars. Anybody who fought in that is seriously dead by now. And the people who fought in the Third War are dozens of lightyears away and they’re never coming back.”

Monkey nodded. “But it’s part of their training. So let’s say they’ve got a commander, maybe the whole raiding party, who used to be in the Fleet. I mean, come on, they can’t be so stupid they’d send complete novices on a space raid.”

“We don’t know how stupid they are.”

“You don’t take automatic projectile weapons to a space battle,” said Monkey. “They have to know that.”

“They don’t have to know anything,” said Dabeet. “That’s one more thing we have to be alert to. They might breach the hull all over the place.”

“You can’t let them in,” said Monkey.

“I’m aware of the dangers. And now I’m more aware of more dangers. I don’t know what my plan is yet because I can’t think of a plan until I know what actions are possible. I’m just telling you the situation. If I don’t let them in, my mother dies. If I do let them in, maybe nobody dies. Maybe no weapons are fired.”

“Maybe we all die.”

“That’s what I think is most likely,” said Dabeet.

“Oh,” said Monkey. “That’s right, I heard you were smart.”

“I think they were lying when they talked about hostages. I think they’re planning good old-fashioned terrorism. They’re going to come into Fleet School Station and kill every one of us here, in some bloody and horrible way, and then flee. So the force that comes to save us is shocked and grieved and so angry that they have to retaliate, only they have no idea who did it because they’re all gone.”

“Or,” said Monkey, “if they can’t get away in time, they have enough explosives with them to smithereen the whole station so no bodies are ever recovered. That works, too.”

“They didn’t strike me as suicide-bomber types,” said Dabeet.