Children of the Fleet Read online

  And maybe they had information Dabeet could not know, that affirmed there would be no Formic invasion fleet popping up at near lightspeed at the fringes of the solar system. In that case the closing of Battle School made sense. So did the International Fleet’s unhooking itself from the Hegemony, so they were no longer dependent on or obedient to any Earthbound institution.

  But all those decisions were reached after Ender Wiggin’s victory. Until that moment, the IF had to be planning for a much longer war, for a struggle at least as epic as the one between Rome and Carthage, a back-and-forth, ever-escalating struggle to the death with a resourceful and implacable enemy.

  They would need commanders even smarter than Ender Wiggin and his brilliant jeesh. That meant that Graff and the IF high command would have already set in motion plans to get those commanders.

  What part did I play in those plans?

  The docking was complete. The cargo vessel was entirely inside a docking bay—they were designed for each other, and for every other ordinary null-gee cargo bay throughout the solar system. The artificial gravity had kicked in; there was an audible sigh of relief from those suffering from nausea. Now it was time to unfasten seat belts and set foot again on a floor that knew it was a floor, and not a wall or ceiling.

  Stepping out through the door onto a gangway, Dabeet held tightly to the railing on his right so that he could free his eyes to take in the surrounding area. The cargo vessel was a snug enough fit, and now conveyor belts were taking cargo from the ship into the bowels of the Fleet School space station. Dabeet wanted to follow the cargo and see how it was dispersed and stowed, but a cough from behind him reminded him that he was supposed to be moving forward down the gangway.

  Waiting at the foot of the ramp was a tall blond lieutenant—Dabeet had memorized all the insignias of the IF—who introduced himself as Odd Oddson. “And yes,” the lieutenant continued, “my parents were singularly uncreative, and I know that it makes an amusing pun in English.”

  “I hope you’ll explain it to me sometime, sir,” said Dabeet.

  Odd looked at him a bit askance, but then grinned. “A dry sense of humor is unusual among the children, Mr. Ochoa. But not unwelcome, or at least not to me. In the old days, you would have arrived with a squad of greenies, and I would have led you to your new barracks. These are less formal times, and nobody comes from Earth, so we have no ordinary ritual for receiving you.”

  “I’m glad you were kind enough to meet me, sir,” said Dabeet.

  “I was assigned, so the kindness all came from Commandant Urska Kaluza.”

  Dabeet instantly made the associations. “A Slovene name,” he said. “Urska is short for Ursula—does she really use her nickname?”

  “She is addressed as Commandant and Sir,” said Oddson. “By you, at least. Colonel Kaluza by those of high enough rank to address her by name rather than office.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of informality, sir,” said Dabeet. “At least not without invitation.”

  “It will never come, I promise you,” said Oddson. “And now you’ll get a chance to practice all your courtesies, because she wanted to meet you upon arrival. Follow me.”

  Dabeet hadn’t been in such a complex three-dimensional structure in his life. Planetside buildings tended toward rectangles, and floors were level. Here, the main corridors ran around the wheel of the space station, with the outer surface of the wheel forming the floor. Dabeet was sure this must be a holdover from the earliest days of space colonization, when a kind of pseudo-gravity was achieved by spinning the whole station, so that centrifugal force would make a kind of “down” for the inhabitants.

  But artificial gravity had been around since the days of Ukko Jukes, and now a complex set of computations kept real gravity very nearly balanced throughout the station, except in the battleroom cubes at the center. That central placement would have made them effectively weightless when they were first built; now they were sealed off from all gravity so that the battlerooms had no heavy or light spots, and objects flew straight from one side to the other. Again, Dabeet’s pre-voyage study made it unnecessary for him to ask questions.

  Nor was Dabeet feeling chatty. Instead of commenting on what he saw during the trip from deck to deck, from spoke to spoke of the wheel, he filed everything away, along with excellent estimates of the distances involved, as he began to construct his internal map of Fleet School. Already he knew just how far it was when the upward curve of the long corridors made the feet of someone moving away from him disappear. As he grew taller, that distance would change.

  Commandant Urska Kaluza did not rise from her chair when Lieutenant Oddson introduced him and then immediately left. “I thought we’d seen the last Earthside student.”

  Not knowing whether she was pleased or displeased to have her expectation broken, Dabeet said nothing.

  “You tried hard enough to get here—yes, we saw all your applications and petitions and pathetic pleas and test scores. Now I’d like to know what you expect from this school. If you have in mind a panacea for all your problems, you’re going to be disappointed.”

  “Disappointments are unavailable to those without expectations,” said Dabeet.

  “What a strutting little prig you are,” she commented, seemingly without rancor or distaste. “It will be interesting to see if you make any friends at all.”

  Dabeet restrained himself from saying, My strutting priggishness may be nearly as great a handicap to friend-making as your complete disregard for the feelings of others. Instead, he stood in silence, regarding her without a trace of an expression that might be construed as a response to her rudeness.

  I’m like a machine that self-programs to get through social situations.

  In this case, a complete lack of expression was the most challenging response he could give Urska Kaluza, because she could not possibly detect anything in his face for which she could punish or even criticize him, and yet it would be infuriating that her rudeness had no effect whatsoever. “Deadface,” Dabeet called this expression, and it was his favorite to use with adults who were impressed with their own authority.

  He thought of several things to say. “Where are you going to place me, to maximize my opportunity to make no friends?” or “Since you’re my only friend now, I hope I can visit here often,” or “What did you say? I’m sorry, I was praying.” He could use such verbal jabs with teachers at Conn, because they were used to him and sometimes they would even laugh. But with Kaluza, it would be taken as insubordination at a level that might get him sent back to Earth. So she got deadface, and nothing else, until she decided to speak again.

  “Don’t you have any questions? You’re the least curious child I’ve seen here.”

  “You’re already annoyed with me, sir,” said Dabeet. “Perhaps because I wrote too many petitions and applications. I can’t unwrite them, and whatever I say, including what I’m saying now, will only annoy you.”

  “You sound like a robot,” said Kaluza. “They’ve sent me a robot to turn into a human.”

  Again, Dabeet remained silent. But he took her words and spun them into a series of thoughts. He knew he didn’t really sound like a robot, partly because the software that produced speech for most robots nowadays was pretty natural-sounding, and partly because he spoke with normal intonation, as if he were giving directions to a lost traveler. His face might be expressionless, but his voice had the ordinary music of the English language, spoken calmly.

  All that nonsense that Graff was so interested in, my story about a puppet who wanted to cut the strings. I am a puppet—but I control the strings myself. A self-operating puppet isn’t a puppet at all, is it? Being a puppet means that someone else controls you. So the truth is that I’m the only non-puppet in a world of puppets—all of them responding to whatever emotional strings are pulled by people and events around them, while I alone am free to choose any or none of those responses.

  “And stubborn,” she said.

  “Yes, sir
,” said Dabeet.

  “Defiant,” she added.

  “I am not, sir,” said Dabeet. “I’m waiting for directions or orders, which I intend to obey to the degree that they’re within my power. I believe, sir, that obeying your orders to your satisfaction may be out of my power, but I intend to do my best, and I hope you’ll come to judge who I really am by what I do in the days and weeks to come, rather than by how much I annoy you at our first meeting.”

  “Graff said you’d be my best student.”

  This seemed to require no answer, so Dabeet gave none.

  “If I send him a vid of this meeting,” said Kaluza, “he’ll laugh and tell me that since I left you no possibility of an appropriate response, I had no choice but to accept your complete nonresponse.”

  If you know that, thought Dabeet, then why did you behave that way, and why are you still pissed off at me?

  “I suppose this means that in Graff’s eyes, you’ve passed yet one more examination. Perhaps he’ll suggest I put you on the diplomacy track.”

  Diplomacy? That was a field where total control over face and voice could be useful. But what would diplomacy have to do with exploration and colonization?

  “But I doubt you’ll be in Fleet School by the time we start sorting you into tracks. Step outside the door, Mr. Ochoa, and Lieutenant Oddson will take you to your assigned barracks and introduce you to your team.”

  Team, and not army. So the old terminology of Battle School had been replaced. But would there be any real difference?

  The door opened. Dabeet stepped through it. The door closed behind him.

  “Well?” asked Oddson.

  “She said you’d take me to my barracks and introduce me to my team.”

  “So you didn’t annoy her enough to incur immediate punishment?”

  “Is that a failure or a success on my part?” asked Dabeet.

  “It’s an interesting fact. Her normal method is to goad each new student into doing something that puts them on report, so they have to do some kind of unpleasant duty. It unites new students against a common enemy.”

  “So the commandant poses herself as our enemy?” asked Dabeet.

  “Apparently not you,” said Oddson. “Kind of a shame, since there’s a sort of competition in the armies about who got the worst punishment after their first interview.”

  “Thanks for tipping me off, so I could make sure to get a spectacular one.”

  “Nobody’s ever gotten away without a punishment, as far as I know,” said Oddson. “Your colors are Green Blue Green, so if you’re ever lost, you touch the wall on either side. Your colors will appear, and you can find your barracks, at least.”

  Dabeet wanted to say, “I don’t get lost,” but he decided that it was important not to boast. He recognized that his impulse to be boastful was the result of fear—no one knew him here, and so he wanted to assert his abilities as a means of winning respect. But this only worked on faculty members at Conn, and it was pretty plain that the IF didn’t work like the faculty and staff at an elementary school for gifted students in Indiana.

  Rather than asserting his strength, it might work better to show—no, not weakness, but vulnerability.

  “I wish,” said Dabeet, “that I could observe for a while before I actually have to interact with anyone.”

  “It can be a bit intimidating. But I can promise you, holding yourself aloof won’t work at all. Don’t just watch. Engage.”

  Engage. Dabeet had seen plenty of that, even at a school of intellectuals and artists like Conn. To engage usually meant to challenge, to compete. A new male baboon, demonstrating and asserting himself until the rest of the troop pummeled him enough that he felt like he belonged. The pummeling wasn’t literal at Conn—or at least not usually—but here it might be. Because Kaluza might have called it a team, but Oddson still called it an army, and the military culture might have survived the name change.

  Maybe I should have taken martial arts and self-defense classes seriously instead of regarding them as a waste of time.

  No. If somebody wants to pound on me a little, to make sure I know my place, my best tactic is to give a couple of punches at first and then curl up in a ball and call out my surrender. Accept whatever place I’m assigned by the other kids, and then work to improve it over time. To live among baboons, you have to accept the baboon rituals and pretend to believe in the baboon religion, whatever it is.

  And then try not to think of your peers as baboons, because if this is going to work out at all, you have to be able to lead them, rely on the ones who have useful abilities, and keep everybody happy.

  6

  —Whatever you expect this arrogant little git to accomplish, what makes you think Fleet School can help him?

  —My question is whether he can help Fleet School.

  The barracks was surprisingly small. When Oddson touched a panel and the door slid open, Dabeet stepped through and found himself at one end of a long narrow bunk-lined room that ran parallel to the corridor. This meant that the floor of the barracks rose up at the far end, so the last bunks weren’t visible unless you knelt down.

  Dabeet did not kneel down. Instead he looked at the boys in the nearer bunks. Most of them were reading, typing, or manipulating three-dimensional objects in the space above their holodesks. Only two of them looked up enough to notice him.

  No. They didn’t notice Dabeet. They noticed Oddson. And they immediately scrambled out of their bunks and stood at attention in front of their bunks.

  Without a single word being spoken, each boy noticed the movement of the other boys near him, looked to see what was going on, and then immediately stood at attention by his bunk. The last boy to notice what was happening set his holodesk down with a sigh and stood at attention with a posture and facial expression that were eloquent with despair.

  “I’m glad you concentrate so deeply on the things you read, Mr. Cabeza,” said Oddson. “Standing order, young man.”

  Cabeza clambered up to the top bunk and stood on it. Only you couldn’t stand on it—the ceiling was too low. So he struck a pose with his back flat along the ceiling, pressing upward from his half-bent legs. It looked very uncomfortable and wearying.

  “I’m here to bring you the twenty-third member of your exalted company,” said Oddson.

  “We only have nineteen, sir,” said a babyish boy near the door.

  “You only have nineteen that bunk with you right now,” said Oddson. “Nor do you know enough about the new boy’s ability to assess whether he alone is enough to bring the whole team up to snuff.”

  “Too bad he doesn’t have a name,” said the babyish one.

  “My name is Dabeet Ochoa.”

  “A talker,” said one of the boys.

  “What’s his punishment?” asked another.

  “None assigned,” said Oddson.

  This spread in a buzz of reaction to the far end of the room.

  “Didn’t he meet Commandant Kaluza?” asked the babyish one.

  “He did, Mr. Timeon,” said Oddson.

  “And no punishment?”

  A few chuckled. A few made faces of disgust and stared coldly at Dabeet.

  “Must be a suckup,” said someone not too far away.

  “Kahlua punishes suckups worst of all,” said Timeon scornfully.

  “She must love him,” said a kid well back from the door.

  “Commandant Kaluza loves all the children,” said Oddson.

  That was greeted with snickers and hoots.

  “She is deeply concerned about the happiness and well-being of every one of you,” said Oddson.

  “Except this new one,” said Timeon. “This Ochoa.”

  “Oh, she punished me,” said Dabeet—loudly enough to reach to the back of the barracks.

  “Lying isn’t going to gain you an advantage,” said Oddson.

  “The punishment was to give me no punishment, when apparently it’s the custom for every new member of a troop to somehow offend the
commandant and arrive here with hours of punishment. My lack of a punishment makes you all suspicious of me.” He meant to go on, explaining, That isolates me even beyond the natural isolation of a new boy, arriving after everybody already knows everyone else. But he stopped himself, aware that his explanation wasn’t convincing anybody.

  “So your punishment is to have no punishment,” said Timeon skeptically.

  “What makes you so special that she singled you out like that?”

  “I can’t guess at her motive,” said Dabeet. “But it might be because I’ve never been away from Earth before.”

  That got everyone’s attention. “You’ve never been in null-gee before?” asked Timeon.

  Dabeet shook his head, as he heard the grumbling.

  “Earthsider.”

  “Mudbooter.”

  “You’re going to kill us in the standings,” said Timeon.

  “Quite possibly,” said Dabeet. “But I’ll learn as quickly as I can. Especially if I get help.”

  There was no rush to volunteer. Dabeet had thought there might be at least a few offers or reassurances. Maybe there was something in his tone of voice. Maybe he really did sound arrogant and aloof. He’d never asked other children for help before; he wasn’t good at it. Or maybe they hated Earthsiders so much that it overcame their need to get him up to speed so he didn’t “kill” them in the standings. Or maybe they were a bunch of dull bobs and he’d have to make his way through this school alone.

  “New Soldier Rule,” said Oddson.

  Immediately the boy on the lower bunk nearest the door got up and carried his holodesk and a small stack of clothes toward the back of the barracks.

  “This is your bunk now,” said Oddson to Dabeet.

  “I didn’t mean to make anybody move,” said Dabeet.

  “New Soldier Rule,” said Oddson. “Weren’t you listening? Can’t you extrapolate? You need to be where you can listen to the more experienced students. Notice that the operative word here is ‘listen.’”