Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(82)

Since Dabeet had a better understanding of higher mathematics than Gusti, he was pretty sure that gibe didn’t apply to him.

Gusti walked away, continuing to pass along the corridor. He didn’t stop to open any of the barracks doors, as if it didn’t occur to him that the child he sought might be in one of the rooms. Then again, the children were not supposed to be able to open barracks doors without having their palms authorized.

Maybe the system was supposed to work that way. But Monkey had read the transcripts of the trials of Hyrum Graff and others after the war, and among the details she thought she remembered reading was a document that included a code-number override to Dragon Army barracks. And since it had worked, everybody assumed that what they had been told about station security was true.

But what if it wasn’t? Dabeet got up from the floor and walked along the corridor in the direction he had been going before, toward the upshaft. He stopped at the first door he came to, which was definitely not Dragon Army’s barracks door, and entered the same code into the virtual keypad.

The door opened.

Was the code a universal override?

Dabeet closed the door and went along to the next barracks door. Since the whole length of each barracks ran parallel to the corridor on the opposite side from the hidden service corridors, the distance from one door to the next was considerable. And, just as with the service corridors, the curvature of the wheel of the station made it so that two barracks entrances were the most that were ever visible at a time.

At the third door, Dabeet didn’t enter any code. He just palmed the barracks door.

Nothing happened.

He palmed it again. It opened.

At the next door he learned that double-palming worked as well as the code. There was no security here at all.

Was it because these barracks were unused? Or would the same procedure open the occupied barracks on the next two levels down?

He thought of going back to tell the others, but then he thought of something else.

Why would an adult teacher, an officer, be wandering an unused corridor looking for a student? Why would he be asking other students where Timeon had gone? Wasn’t the station system tracking all the children by chips in their uniforms?

Dabeet had been thinking that the reason he hadn’t been caught exploring was because Roboto Smirnova hadn’t turned his chip back on after their foray to the door, and it was dumb luck that nobody had tried, and failed, to locate Dabeet on the tracking system. But he had been worried that the more he went around with Monkey into places where they didn’t belong, the likelier it would be that her chip would give the game away.

But no. Gusti had to look for Timeon because there were no tracking chips. There was no security system. Doors could be opened by anyone, kids could go wherever they wanted, because the adults in this place didn’t care where the kids went or what they did. At least not enough to encumber themselves with an elaborate system of codes and IDs in order to open doors.

It sounded so careless to Dabeet that he was sure there must be another explanation. But what could that be? They shut down student-tracking because some rats had swallowed a lot of chips and they were now flooding the system with false locations? The system was being updated and rebooted so the lack of tracking was only temporary?

Stupidity and carelessness sounded more plausible to him.

Was it possible that airlock doors were just as easy to open? Had security become that lax in the station?

Then, a more chilling thought: Was the security system turned off so that the raiders could open any door by double-palming it? Could they possibly be on their way already? Could Dabeet’s “assignment” be a smoke screen, to lull him into a false sense of security about how long he had before they arrived?

But if they wanted their arrival time to be a surprise, why tell Dabeet anything at all? If the security system was this disabled, why did they need Dabeet to open anything for them? What was the point of involving Dabeet if their inside people in the station were this effective?

No. Likeliest reason for the lax security was the normal one: laziness. Close runner-up: incompetence. Third place: stupidity. These were always the likeliest explanations for procedural lapses. Constant vigilance might be essential to keep a system safe, but constant vigilance was also unbearably tedious, and it was easy to talk yourself into reasons why it wasn’t all that important.

Battle School had held the brightest minds of Earth and trained them to save the human race. Security made sense because important things were happening here.

But Fleet School was only training spacer kids to go off and explore distant planets. These kids weren’t being trained to kill, they were trained to collect plant specimens and read scientific instruments. So … palm-palm, and anybody can open any door. Security consists of not telling the students.

And, amazingly enough, it had worked till now.

Or it hadn’t, but Dabeet wasn’t an insider so nobody had told him.

If I go back and tell them now, they’ll look at me like I’m an idiot because they already know and it never occurred to them that I didn’t know. Like Monkey with the closet doors.

But if you could open the doors to other teams’ barracks, there was no chance that nobody would have used it to commit pranks. We’re children here, thought Dabeet. Some temptations are irresistible.

Dabeet headed briskly back toward the barracks where the meeting was going on. If he ran into Gusti coming back the other way, he’d claim he was now trying to walk off his homesickness. Vigorous exercise, that’s the ticket!