Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(87)

“But come on, Dabeet. Even if our wall forts are brilliant, they aren’t weapons. We can’t build traps into them. They’ll figure out how to dismantle them as fast as we did.”

“Well, maybe. Maybe not. Defensive structures don’t win battles, they only delay them while you wait for relief or hope they give up and go away.”

“Because if they get delayed for a couple of minutes, they’re bound to get discouraged.”

“So the only plan that matters is how to stop them from reaching their objective, and unless their objective is in the battlerooms, there’s no reason they’d ever go there.”

“Well…” said Monkey.

Dabeet tried to guess what she was thinking. “You’re right. We’re the objective.”

“We have no idea what the objective is,” said Monkey, “so I don’t know what you think I was going to say.”

Dabeet started to explain why he thought she had been about to contradict him, but she cut him off.

“So because you imagined you could guess that I was going to contradict you,” said Monkey, “you immediately thought of a deep hole in your previous statement, and talked as if I had said it.”

That was exactly what Dabeet had done. “Yes.”

“I think you’ve just discovered a new mental discipline. Self-contradiction as a spur to creative thinking. You think up something, then you assume it’s an idiotic idea and figure out why it’s dumb, then you think of ways to make it less dumb, and then think of why those things are idiotic—”

“And meanwhile I also assume that the assumption of idioticness is also idiotic and poke holes in that—”

“And in the end, you never reach any useful conclusion or plan of action.”

“Once they hear of this new mental discipline,” said Dabeet, “geniuses everywhere are bound to adopt it as their primary means of analysis.”

“Until it occurs to them that such a mental discipline is also idiotic.”

“Leading to exactly the same result that most commanders get to in war with far less effort,” said Dabeet, “which is why the real geniuses beat them.”

“Why?” asked Monkey. “What result is that?”

“When you focus on trying to figure out the enemy’s plan before he’s shown it to you by taking action, you’re basically playing mental chess against yourself and doing nothing. What if the enemy is so much smarter than you that all your guesses are ridiculously wrong? Or what if the enemy is so stupid that you give them way too much credit?”

“It’s stupid to assume your enemy is stupid,” said Monkey.

“True,” said Dabeet, “but it’s even stupider to try to wage war by outguessing the enemy.”

“Well, you have to try.”

“What you mean is, you can’t help but try,” said Dabeet, “but it’s such a waste of time that you can’t regard anything you think of as a ‘plan.’”

“So we just sit here trying not to think,” said Monkey.

“Not at all. We spend our time planning what we will do to them.”

“How is that better? We don’t know a bit more about them than before, so anything we plan is just a waste of time.”

“Here are the huge differences,” said Dabeet. “First, defensive plans are wasted if the enemy won’t attack where you need him to. But offensive plans don’t require the enemy to act in a certain way. We initiate the action, so we don’t guess what they’ll do, we simply see what they’ve done and where they actually are.”

“They’re not here,” said Monkey, “so we can’t see what they’ve done.”

“And we do know a lot about them,” said Dabeet.

Monkey immediately looked suspicious. “Have you held back information that we need to have?”

“I haven’t held back anything,” said Dabeet. He did not say how hurtful it was that she went straight to that assumption. Why shouldn’t she? She didn’t know Dabeet. She didn’t know she could trust him.

Dabeet wasn’t even sure she could trust him, because he didn’t trust himself. He wouldn’t know what he could do until he did it. He wouldn’t know if he could be trusted until he actually accomplished something.

“Monkey,” said Dabeet. “You know that we know a lot about these raiders. They have to arrive here in a spaceworthy vehicle.”

“Well, duh.”

“Not duh, Monkey. That’s not guessing, it’s something we know. We know it. And that means that you—and everybody like you, who grew up in a spacefaring culture—you already know way more than nothing about their arrival vehicle. I don’t know that stuff, except, like, they have to be able to contain and replenish atmosphere, there’ll be airlocks, some kind of propulsion system. Places for passengers and crew to sit during the voyage. Food. Water.”

“That’s like saying, we know the enemy has to poop sometime. Yeah, but so what?”

Dabeet couldn’t help but laugh. “Monkey, knowing that the enemy has to poop is actually important. On Earth, there’s the whole disposal problem. If their poo gets into their drinking water, they’re going to start getting dysentery and that can destroy your enemy for you.”