Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(83)
He didn’t encounter Gusti.
He double-palmed the door to the supposed Dragon Army barracks. The others stopped talking and looked at him—clearly they had been expecting an adult when the door suddenly opened.
“Something I think you should know,” said Dabeet. He told them about double-palming, and how Monkey’s code worked on other doors. “Maybe it’s only on this level,” said Dabeet. “Maybe not. Maybe all the teachers know about this, maybe not. Did any of you know that double-palming would open any barracks door?”
“Maybe it’s your magical palms,” said Zhang He, already walking to the door. He went outside. The door closed. A moment later, it opened again. “Toguro,” said Zhang He.
“If we have a bunch of people chasing us,” said Monkey, “it might be useful to know we can open any door.”
“Unless they also know it,” said Zhang He.
Then Dabeet told them about Gusti looking for Teburoro Timeon. “They’re not tracking us,” he said. “Whatever Gusti wants with you, Tim, it must be urgent enough that he forgot that he’s not supposed to drop clues that the teachers don’t always know the location of every student.”
“Maybe the system’s down for a few hours,” said Ignazio.
“Maybe,” said Monkey. “But Dabeet and I were gone for more than an hour yesterday and nobody challenged us about it. Nobody came looking for us, nobody said, ‘What were you two kids doing in the service corridors.’”
“That doesn’t prove anything,” said Ragnar.
“You’re right,” said Monkey. “So let’s get some real evidence by asking about it. Then the adults will know that they have to reinstitute the security and tracking systems.”
“I was afraid that if I went exploring,” said Dabeet, “I mean really deep exploring, I’d have to do it without any of my clothes, because supposedly they’re all equipped with a tracking device.”
“Talk about getting caught with your pants down,” said Ragnar.
“It’s a good thing if we can go anywhere,” said Zhang He, “and the bad guys don’t know how to open doors we close behind us. But we can’t know what they know until they get here.”
“If they get here,” said Ragnar.
“Obviously,” said Monkey.
“Sorry I interrupted the meeting,” said Dabeet. “I thought you might have already known this, but if you didn’t, then you needed to.” He turned and left. Nobody called for him to come back.
Dabeet opened the first closet again, and this time nobody came along to prevent him from using the door. Inside the service corridor he was careful to use Monkey’s method of marking his trail, since this was a different level. And the first time he came to one of the outside doors that they had speculated might provide access between levels, he reached out to palm it open.
Access between levels—but inside or outside the closed atmosphere system?
He went back to the nearest closet door and put on a child-sized atmo suit. Then he went back to the outside door. If the suit sensed a drop in pressure, it would automatically attach him to the nearest exterior wall and activate the breathing system. It would also set off a distress call—unless some lazy moron had also disabled that safety feature.
But getting caught outside in an atmo suit wouldn’t necessarily be a disaster, because Dabeet was already regarded as a pathetic loser. “I just wanted to get some experience in space because they didn’t train me before,” he could say. “All these other kids knew what they were doing when they got here. How am I supposed to catch up?” Yes, he could sell the idea that he was just a needy stupid kid doing loser stuff in the effort not to be such a loser.
The door did not lead into cold space. It opened on a narrow vertical passage which, unlike the upshaft and downshaft you could enter from the main corridor, relied on ladders with no gravity assist.
Ladders weren’t easy in an atmo suit. Dabeet thought of taking the thing off as soon as he got to the next level up, but then he realized that his pathetic-loser story was also true. He really did need to get experience doing tasks while wearing an atmo suit. He would never be as adroit and agile as the kids who had grown up in spaceships and space stations—but now he understood that he didn’t have to be the best at space stuff, or even good at it. He only had to be able to perform adequately enough to stay alive in dangerous situations.
He walked around the next level up—marking, again, how far he’d gone each time he passed a shelf unit. But this time he saw that there were different chemicals stored on each shelf unit, and some different tools, too. This made him curious enough to try going out into the main corridor, where he found that he was definitely not on a student barracks level.
Dabeet wanted to test to see if the doors here—which came about three or four times more frequently than barracks doors—responded to the same simple double-palm code. But what if these were teacher sleeping quarters? Those were supposedly on the level below the kitchens, mess halls, gyms, and classrooms, but common knowledge wasn’t always right. He was beginning to wonder whether it was ever right.
And teachers’ sleeping quarters weren’t the only possible uses for these rooms. They could be offices or conference rooms, and if he palmed open a door he might find himself facing six adults having an earnest meeting about what they imagined Monkey and Dabeet had been doing yesterday in the service corridors.