Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(99)

—Yes, you’re right. I should have realized how remarkable that was.

—Could you have been that self-restrained?

—In all the charges brought against me in what we laughingly call my military career, I was never accused of self-restraint.

—My whole career consisted of deliberate self-restraint—but I was only biding my time until I could get my way, enact my plan. I don’t think Dabeet has a plan.

—Wise boy.

—We’ll just have to see how well and quickly he reacts to whatever comes.

—What if there’s no time to react? What if they simply blast the station to bits upon arrival?

—The soldiers on this raid don’t know it’s a one-way ticket. They think they’re coming home. They don’t even think they’re going to have to kill anybody.

—Somebody must know.

—Are you sure of that? Remember who put this all together. Achilles isn’t happy when he has to trust other people to cooperate with his plans. He prefers to deceive everybody, betray everybody. He serves no higher cause that other people would willingly die for. So if he wants everybody to die, he has to fool them into thinking and acting as if they were all going to survive.

—I’m not sure what’s more disturbing: that you think you know Dabeet, or that you think you understand Achilles.

—Achilles has had plenty of time to teach us who he is. Dabeet is still finding out. So I don’t think I know Dabeet. And I think I know Achilles only well enough to predict how he’ll treat anybody who trusts him.

It became a question of sleep. Specifically, this was the question:

If watching for the raiders’ ship is so unimportant that it’s all right for me to take a ten-or six-or four-hour break in order to sleep, then why is it important enough to warrant my spending every waking moment doing it?

And then there was the obvious corollary:

If I don’t sleep, isn’t it possible I’ll doze off while outside the station? Would the suit’s gloves still hold me in place? Or if I’m awake, after a fashion, and I see the ship, what then? If I’m so sleepy that my mental function is impaired, how can I possibly do anything useful?

Then there was the question of food. He was hungry. The suits—he was rotating among three, recharging two while he wore the third—kept him hydrated, but he was already weak with hunger. Yet how would he get food without revealing himself to someone?

Was there any danger from revealing himself? He imagined that most kids thought he had gone with Urska Kaluza, but he was equally certain that none of them cared whether he had or not. And if they saw him, what would be the negative consequence?

Here’s what he imagined: He wasn’t important at Fleet School, but he might be important to the raiders. They had singled him out by holding Mother hostage and getting him to open that door. What if they had some use for him, and looked for him as soon as they arrived? Would it be better to have the other kids say, He left with Urska Kaluza on a packet ship, or to have them say, He’s here somewhere?

He couldn’t function if he was weak from hunger. He really couldn’t function without sleep. Compared to this, the problem of the stinking urine bucket was trivial.

Dabeet remembered back to his time at the Charles G. Conn School for the Gifted. If you missed a meal in the cafeteria, there was a snack buffet. If everything there was stale or dried out or simply gone or not to your liking, you could use vending machines in the study hall. There were choices.

In Fleet School, there was whatever mess you were assigned to, and nothing else. There were mealtimes, and no other times.

The suits had internal clocks, so he knew that it was almost breakfast time in his mess. He could eat, then maybe shower, then sleep up here in the top corridor for fifteen minutes, and then go back on duty.

He could not, could not, enlist some other kid to keep watch with him. Everybody else had assignments that were important to whatever defense command had been created among the students. Dabeet couldn’t be seen as thinking his foolish self-assigned watch duty took priority over official jobs. The last thing he needed was more grounds for resentment or hostility to him. There might well come a time when he needed to be able to present a plan for immediate action and have it evaluated on its merits, rather than through a haze of hatred.

Eat, shower, sleep. That was his decision.

He woke up about an hour before lunch, having inadvertently skipped ahead to the sleep portion of his plan. He was still half in his suit, which he had not hung back up to recharge.

Go back outside and scan the sky again, before eating and showering?

If they come, they come. I’m really not doing anything important. I’m only keeping watch because it was what I could think of that I could do alone. Except I can’t do it alone. My marvelous brilliant superior brain still needs sleep just like any other animal. Too bad I can’t have the sides of my brain take turns sleeping, like a dolphin. Dolphins don’t go into space. They can’t get their flippers properly into spacesuit gloves. Stop trying to think and go eat. Be first in line.

Instead, he went to the shower because nobody else would be there. Either they were all in class—what else would the teachers do with them?—or they were doing some assignment for the Fleet School Defense Command, or whatever the name was, if it had a name. Nobody would be assigned to shower.

It felt good to be clean. Even when he put back on the same unwashed uniform it felt good.