Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(96)

If the station were attacked, the training officers might take command, and if they did, their students would rally around them and obey. That would be a potential disaster for their defense preparations, since they were not part of any of the team organizations, and it would completely disrupt whatever the kids had already planned. But if you knew the station was going to be raided, and you didn’t know that the students were planning an organized resistance, then getting the training officers out of Fleet School would look like an essential move.

Likewise, getting rid of Urska Kaluza—if they thought she was really worth something as a leader, then of course they wanted her gone. And if she was in collusion with the raiders, having her off the station would have been part of their deal.

Whoever was moving them off the station knew about the raid, that was clear enough. Dabeet might have reasoned it out only now, clinging to the outside of the hull, but apparently at some limbic level he had known it instantly.

If he left the station now, and then the raid came, nobody would believe he hadn’t been warned in advance. They would be sure he had lied to them, concealed information, betrayed them.

Here I am, clinging to the outside of the station. I’m as gone, as far as the other kids know, as if I had been spirited away on whatever ship was taking good old Urska Kaluza.

Poor me.

Dabeet forced himself to calm down and think. Was there something useful he could do right now? Yes. He could see Embarcation 2 from here. Or, rather, he could see any ship that was docked there.

But not very well. The tail end of something.

He wouldn’t have to move very far along the wheel to get a better view. One airlock away. Maybe two.

He was about to move across the closed airlock door, but then he stopped himself. “The bar on the other side of the airlock. Attached to the hull.” Then he reached for it. Naming each gap in the plates, the lips on the center band, he made it to the next airlock.

Clearly the back end of a ship. But that much he already knew.

Carefully, gap by gap, plate by plate, he made it to the airlock after that. And now he could see the IF insignia. An official ship, not a raider, not a yacht, a real ship. Small. Not even a cruiser, more like a messenger. But it would be armed, because all IF ships were armed. This little packet boat could probably blow the raiders out of the sky. But it wouldn’t be here. It would be gone.

Well, it would be gone if they gave up on finding Dabeet and went without him.

If I don’t go with them, I may well die.

He immediately answered his own thought with another: If I go with them, all the others may die.

He almost laughed at himself. You think you can save everybody? You think your absence will doom them to a miserable death? Even if we’re facing Goliath, Dabeet, you’re no David.

I will be if that’s what I need to be, Dabeet told himself. I won’t be a great hero-king whose name will live for three thousand years. But I’ll do an adequate job of whatever needs doing.

He memorized the ship’s number and then settled down to wait.

After only a few minutes, he remembered that even if they weren’t tracking his suit, they certainly would have a record of his airlock door opening. If somebody poked their head out right now, he’d be in plain view.

Carefully, naming every gap, every reach, Dabeet made his way from the middle wheel to the inner one, the topmost of the three. It was tricky because the three wheels hadn’t been designed to move together. Instead, the inner wheel ran on a track along the inside of the middle wheel, just as the outer wheel ran on a track along the outside of the middle wheel.

Originally, the three wheels had moved at their own rate, so that the false gravity from centrifugal force would be roughly even among the wheels, innermost to outermost. Ah, the things that engineers had to cope with, in the days before the Jukes corporation did its breakthrough work with gravitics.

But how did they get from wheel to wheel? Now, with the wheels in lockstep, they had the elevator shafts from level to level and wheel to wheel. In the original design, how would teachers and students get from their residential levels to the classroom level?

It wasn’t a school, then, of course. The station was built before the arrival of the first Formic ship, before there was an International Fleet. It was meant to be a permanent way station between Earth and Moon, perhaps a depot or transshipment facility. Maybe a way station for Terran and Lunar shuttles. Maybe a resort, a hotel and restaurant and spa for people who were ridiculously rich.

Maybe one wheel for each purpose. Each one supplied and administered separately. All this expense for what, commerce? The tourist trade?

But all this was back in the days before Jukes’s breakthroughs in the science of gravity led to the technology of gravitics. Before the Jukes Gravic Downmaster eliminated freefall inside space vehicles, except where you wanted it. Gravic fields could be fine-tuned to provide just the right downward pull in every location. Science was amazing in those days—before the Formics ever came. Maybe because space was still new, the solar system was still pioneer territory.

Why, the people who built this primitive wheel design probably still thought there were only four forces, and still imagined they could find the Grand Unified Theory—a notion that had gone the way of the Philosopher’s Stone and Aether and the elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. Yet the station was still in place, still turning—for stability now rather than for illusory gravity—and still protecting its inhabitants from radiation, dust collisions, and the near-vacuum of space. Rather like the Roman roads whose pavement, however overgrown, still ran across Britain, Gaul, Italy, Iberia, and northern Africa.