Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(84)

Then again, they might be storage rooms, and one of them might be filled with useful laser weapons. Or maybe they were filled with uniforms from long-defunct student armies from Battle School days, and extra flash suits from the time when twice as many kids needed them constantly for practice and competition.

Or something really crazy, like the frozen corpses of Formics that died at the end of the war and were being saved up for later study.

That was stupid. After the first and second wars, no Formics ever got this close to Earth, and so there’d be no reason at all to transport the corpses here.

Except that Lagrange stations were convenient depots, near to Earth and the Moon but not in orbit. That’s why smugglers were using it, right?

What if these rooms were being used by the smugglers?

Very inconvenient location for warehousing, thought Dabeet. But then, the parcels that he and Zhang had seen were small. The big stuff stayed in the warehouses in the docking area, and the small secret stuff was stowed up here.

He listened at a door and heard nothing. That meant either excellent sound isolation or the room had no conversation going on.

He double-palmed it. It slid open just like a barracks door. A light came on, just as in a barracks. Shelves lined the back wall—deep shelves, deeper than a single row of bunks. And some of them—but not all—were laden with metal crates and trunks.

Each one was tagged with the name of an officer.

This was where they stowed their possessions—whatever they didn’t need in daily life in Fleet School. If somebody wanted to hide something dangerous, it might be here—but then, smugglers would hardly put their contraband in trunks labeled with their own names.

There weren’t enough staff and faculty here to account for all the rooms on this level. So Dabeet stepped out and closed the door.

Keep exploring here, or go back into the service corridor?

He opted for the service corridor. Exploring all these rooms would be a job for the whole team, if they decided it was worth it. Maybe there were weapons on this level, maybe not. But they needed to get a map of what rooms contained what kind of stuff. It was too big a job for Dabeet alone. What he wanted was not a specific inventory, but rather a general map of the station.

So he went back to the outside laddershaft he had come through and went up one more level.

This time the ladder tilted sharply inward, so it wasn’t really a ladder anymore. More like a stairway with very narrow treads. And when he got to the top, it wasn’t a full standing-height door. Dabeet opened it, and found himself in a completely different kind of corridor.

This must be the top level, where the wheel of the Fleet School station narrowed. There was no room for a public corridor at all. And nothing was stored up here. Instead, ductwork, cables, and pipes lined both sides of the narrow corridor.

The floor consisted of sections about a meter long, with smooth, solid outer edges and open-weave centers, so Dabeet could see through the floor to the additional cables and pipes that ran below it. The solid edges bore the unmistakable marks of wheels; this was a kind of track, on which some kind of vehicle ran.

When Dabeet tried to stand, he found that he could—but anybody taller than him would be completely unable to do so. Even Dabeet had to move his head to one side or stoop over whenever he came to a light fixture.

The place wasn’t dim, though—if somebody needed to come up here to repair or replace something, they’d have plenty of light to see what they were doing.

Dabeet had to walk along the corridor for a while, just to see if there was any change. There was, of course. Since the level below this one had lots of rooms instead of a series of long barracks rooms parallel with the main corridor, there were ducts and wiring leading down into those spaces at appropriate intervals.

But at intervals that suggested the size of a barracks room, there were much thicker arrays of ductwork, cables, and pipes leading downward. These, Dabeet decided, must pass through a thicker-than-usual wall in the next level, in order to service the barracks rooms two, three, and four levels down.

A little mental calculation made it plain that these ducts couldn’t possibly provide atmo and heating for more than three levels, so beginning four levels down, a different duct-and-pipe system must service the lower levels. Maybe a corridor just like this one, only upside down, ran along under the lowest level, with ducts rising upward to the levels above. Or maybe there was an “empty” floor like this one in the middle somewhere.

Good to know this existed, because most of the kids in Fleet School could run along this corridor, while it would be nothing but trouble for adults. A reasonable escape route, especially because the floor curved even more steeply upward, restricting visibility more than on the lower levels.

Then he came to a place where something was attached to the ceiling, forcing him to get down on all fours to get past it. When he was under the thing, it took little time for him to realize that he was looking at the cart designed to run along the track—four wheels and some kind of propulsion system. No steering, though—just guide wheels mounted sideways, so that the cart was running along the sides as well as the base of the segmented floor.

Dabeet examined the floor sections again, and realized now that there was a flange running along the raised edges—except right here, where the cart was attached to the ceiling. If the cart was lowered straight down, it would settle right in between the edges, and the wheels would go right into their place. Once the cart moved forward or backward a meter, the side-wheels would be under the flange, so that in case there was a loss of gravity—or centrifugal force—the cart would not rise away from the floor.