Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(97)

Old space stations like this could be retrofitted fairly safely because they weren’t going anywhere. They didn’t have to be built to withstand powerful acceleration and deceleration, or to cope with collisions with high-velocity dust as a spaceship neared lightspeed. There was no way to keep the really old spaceships in service except in near-Earth traffic, shuttling among stations, ships, and the Moon. A station like Fleet School, though, stayed in its position at L-5, used for whatever purpose the IF still had for it.

The differential in movement between the wheels had never been very fast. Because workmen were expected to have to work on the juncture between the wheels, there were handrails above and below the tracks, precisely so that workers could do exactly what Dabeet needed to do—move from wheel to wheel without danger.

Only Dabeet was thinking the way Monkey had taught him to think: What is the safest way? The rings were now locked in place by struts connecting the wheels, and by moving only a few panels to the nearest strut, Dabeet could grip the strut and walk it hand-over-hand “up” to the next wheel. It was a safer grip, a shorter path, and didn’t require him to go into the wedgelike space between tubes.

Having climbed the strut, Dabeet was on the inner ring now, and he made his way easily but carefully up to a position near the top. He would be far more visible here than he was down near the juncture, but who would be looking? It wasn’t as if anybody ever looked out the window—there were never any windows on a station like this. Any kind of see-through panel would last only a couple of years at most before microcollisions with dust and debris scored the surface so much that you couldn’t see through it at all. And anything that mattered would have to be detected from much farther away than you could see with the naked eye through a window.

So nobody would see him unless they were using instruments to deliberately scan the wheels of the school in order to find him. If they wanted him that badly, there was nowhere he could hide.

From this position, Dabeet had a good view of near space. He knew that any ship that wanted to approach unseen could do it by switching off its blinkers—except when sunlight caught it. Nothing could hide from the stark searchlight of the Sun. Even nanooze didn’t make a ship’s surface completely nonreflective.

But of course the raiders wouldn’t come now, while the IF packet boat was still docked.

How long before they gave up on Dabeet?

How long before he had to go inside to change suits, to replenish his atmo? He had made sure that the top-level spacesuits were fully charged, but he was wearing one from the middle wheel. Less than fifteen minutes left.

Dabeet made his way to the nearest airlock and clung to the bar there. He couldn’t see whether any ships were approaching, but it was more important to get inside quickly when the time came, change into a fully loaded spacesuit, and then get back out.

Just as he was about to press the OPEN button on the airlock, he saw the packet boat drift backward out of Embarcation 2. They had stopped looking for him.

He was watching it clear the embarcation center when his suit alarm went off. Oh, that’s right. The atmo in the spacesuit didn’t care whether they were looking for him or not. He had exactly one minute to get inside before he started to suffer mental degradation from lack of oxygen.

He made it with thirty-five seconds to spare.

They had left without him. So he didn’t need to go back outside. Did he?

What if the teachers had orders to arrest him and hold him for the next ship?

One thing was clear. If the raiders really had arranged for this IF ship to get him, Urska Kaluza, and the training officers out of the way, that meant he would never get an instruction to open an access door. Which meant that he didn’t have to figure out how to open one of the main airlocks for them when they arrived.

They didn’t need him. Maybe they had never needed him. Maybe all of this was for no other purpose than to create evidence that he was the Fleet School traitor who was taking orders from the raiders.

Did that mean Mother was dead? Or soon would be?

Or had she been dead all along?

Or had she never been in danger?

There was no way to know.

What he could do was keep watch, so when the raiders came, he’d know where their ship was, and which airlock on which wheel they entered through.

Probably one of the wheels under construction, Dabeet thought.

I have no basis for deciding what is and is not probable, he replied to himself. It could be anywhere on the station. It could be Embarcation 1 or 2, for all I know. It could be one of the cargo bays. It could be the one-man emergency airlock that I just used to come into the ship. It could be any of them, because they couldn’t be locked. Any worker or soldier or other spacewalker would never be locked out of access to air, on any IF installation, anywhere. Miners and corporate ships and stations followed the same protocol. Hundreds of back doors on this space station. The only security measure was the alarms that went off when an airlock door was opened.

Mine didn’t set off an alarm, thought Dabeet. I opened it in plenty of time for them to find me, but nobody came in search of me. I was so findable, yet I remained unfound.

With Robota Smirnova gone, was it possible that the adults didn’t know how to check to see which open airlock had set off an alarm?

Or was shutting down the alarm system part of the raiders’ plan?

Or had Urska Kaluza shut the system down as part of her deal with them?