“And I’m not dead,” said Dabeet, “so apparently I could trust her.”
“But she’s off station now.”
“Everything I’ve told you so far, she knows, mostly because she helped me give the signal. I lied to her about the reasons. About what the signal meant.”
Monkey cocked her head. “Buffering. Buffering.”
“I’m telling you.” He took a deep breath. Nothing came out of his mouth. He covered his face with his hands.
“Tell you what,” said Monkey. “I promise not to kill you for just telling me. How about that?”
“What I’m afraid of is getting you killed,” said Dabeet. “I’m afraid of getting everybody killed.” Then he shook off his dread and told her, straight out, what the South Americans told him they were going to do.
“They really think this would work?” asked Monkey. “They think they can remain anonymous so that the Fleet would have to stop all the wars on Earth in order to respond to an act of terrorism?”
“I don’t know what they really think,” said Dabeet. “There’s an old movie called The Mouse that Roared. Mother and I watched it and it was funny but not-funny. They had kind of the same plan. After World War II and the Marshall Plan—you know what that was?”
Monkey rolled her eyes. “I go to a world-class school and I’m a very good student, Dab. I get it already—some little country got the idea of invading America, losing the war, and then America would come in and occupy them and solve all their problems.”
“You guessed that?”
She shook her head. “You Americans always think the rest of the world—”
“Stop,” said Dabeet. “No sentence that begins, ‘You Americans always,’ is going to end productively.”
She grinned. “Such a patriot.”
“Not born there, but yes. We don’t want to waste time on the argument about how the Americans in the twentieth century were the most beneficent empire in history, or not. Right?”
She opened her mouth and made a sound that could have been the beginning of a “just one more thing” kind of argument, and then she closed her mouth. “So the South Americans are going to come in through a door you open and peacefully take all the children and teachers and station workers hostage. Then the Fleet will go down to Earth to straighten things out. But you’re forgetting one tiny thing.”
“The Fleet will come get their children back, and they won’t be nice about it.”
“So you didn’t forget it. Did they?”
“I don’t know what they’re thinking. They didn’t ask me for my advice and there wasn’t a question time for me to learn all about their plans.”
“There’s no way this doesn’t end ugly,” said Monkey.
“Even if they manage to take over the station without firing a shot,” said Dabeet, “what are they going to do when the Fleet sends an attack squad?”
“Maybe they plan to leave the station right away,” said Monkey. “Before the IF can respond. Take maybe ten or twenty kids down to Earth or Luna or some weird little space station they’ve already rented or something.”
“Nothing will work as they planned,” said Dabeet. “Because these guys are idiots. At least the ones I was kidnapped by. They could have taken me in a completely undetectable way, but instead they do it so that the cops and the principal know that I was kidnapped. The only reason it didn’t make the news is that MinCol hushed it up.”
“He knows about this?”
“I fed him a cock-and-bull story but I think he’s better at pretending to believe me than I am at lying to him.”
“You really stink at lying,” said Monkey. “It takes a lot of human interaction to work up decent lying skills.”
“I hope you teach classes in that someday soon, because that’s a survival skill I really need.”
“Oh, you’re already doing the most important thing, which is, Don’t talk. Don’t tell anybody you have a secret. Don’t tell lies, don’t tell anything at all.”
“Oh, é. I’ve got that down pretty well.”
“So you have to save your mother. If they can’t get into the station, she’s dead.”
“They say she’ll die and I don’t have any reason to doubt them.”
“So let’s say that they really mean for the station takeover to be bloodless.”
“It can’t be,” said Dabeet. “There are enough security guys in the station, not to mention teachers who are experienced soldiers, that somebody’s going to get killed.”
“And they’re dirts,” said Monkey. Then, seeing the look on his face, she explained: “Dirtbabies. People from Earth.”
“Like me,” said Dabeet.
“Oh. You weren’t puzzled, you were annoyed.”
“They’re dirts, yes. You were making some point?”
“They’re going to bring guns.”
Dabeet shrugged. “Possibly.”
“Guns, on a station with an airtight hull.”
She apparently took Dabeet’s silence as incomprehension, so she elaborated. “You fire heavy bullets inside a ship, they’re going to make holes in the walls. In the outside walls.”
Dabeet already understood, but she was enjoying the explanation so much that he played dumb a little. It was annoying how completely she bought it. “But I thought all the outside surfaces of Fleet ships were coated in nanooze, so they seal up wherever they’re breached.”
“Let’s test how efficient that is, and find out how much atmo can escape through six hundred machine-gun bullet holes before they heal over. Nanooze is like sticking your finger in the dike, it doesn’t rebuild the original surface the way Formic ships did.”
“So it’s dangerous.”
“Incredibly dangerous,” said Monkey. “Now, if they’re commanded by somebody who fought in space with the Fleet and then went back down to Earth—”
“There’s no such person in the solar system,” said Dabeet. “The only battles that were fought close enough in for the survivors to return to Earth were in the First and Second Formic Wars. Anybody who fought in that is seriously dead by now. And the people who fought in the Third War are dozens of lightyears away and they’re never coming back.”
Monkey nodded. “But it’s part of their training. So let’s say they’ve got a commander, maybe the whole raiding party, who used to be in the Fleet. I mean, come on, they can’t be so stupid they’d send complete novices on a space raid.”
“We don’t know how stupid they are.”
“You don’t take automatic projectile weapons to a space battle,” said Monkey. “They have to know that.”
“They don’t have to know anything,” said Dabeet. “That’s one more thing we have to be alert to. They might breach the hull all over the place.”
“You can’t let them in,” said Monkey.
“I’m aware of the dangers. And now I’m more aware of more dangers. I don’t know what my plan is yet because I can’t think of a plan until I know what actions are possible. I’m just telling you the situation. If I don’t let them in, my mother dies. If I do let them in, maybe nobody dies. Maybe no weapons are fired.”
“Maybe we all die.”
“That’s what I think is most likely,” said Dabeet.
“Oh,” said Monkey. “That’s right, I heard you were smart.”
“I think they were lying when they talked about hostages. I think they’re planning good old-fashioned terrorism. They’re going to come into Fleet School Station and kill every one of us here, in some bloody and horrible way, and then flee. So the force that comes to save us is shocked and grieved and so angry that they have to retaliate, only they have no idea who did it because they’re all gone.”
“Or,” said Monkey, “if they can’t get away in time, they have enough explosives with them to smithereen the whole station so no bodies are ever recovered. That works, too.”
“They didn’t strike me as suicide-bomber types,” said Dabeet.
“What type is that?”
“True believers in a cause they’re willing to die for.”
“The guys you met are the kind who are true believers in a cause they expect other people to die for.”
Dabeet had to agree. “Anyway, you get my point. I think these clowns are planning to kill us all. Or if they aren’t planning it, that’s what’s going to happen anyway because they’ll fight to resist the IF’s take-back of Fleet School. They can’t afford to get caught, because then the IF would know whom to retaliate against. They either have to get away clean, or die in a way that leaves no bodies behind.”
“Killing us all and then getting away is their Plan A,” said Monkey. “And if they can’t get away, blowing up the whole station including themselves is Plan B.”
“I bet they come here on a hijacked ship,” said Dabeet. “I bet they steal an outbound shuttle from the Moon and redirect it here. They’ll only have the weapons and explosives they can carry in luggage.”
“We’re probably making up a far more effective plan than they actually thought of,” said Monkey.
“But we’ll be better off if we don’t assume they’re stupid.”
They sat there looking at each other in silence.
“It doesn’t matter if you open the door,” said Monkey. “Because if you don’t, they’ll just lay down the explosives and blow the station from the outside.”
Dabeet nodded. “That’s probably their Plan C,” he said. “But if I can, I am going to open the door, because, you know. Mother.”
“You’ve got to realize your mother is going to die anyway,” said Monkey. “Speaking realistically. She’s a loose end.”
Dabeet shook his head. “We don’t know that.”
“They’re killers.”
“We think they’re killers because here we are in Fleet School, which used to be Battle School, so we’re predisposed to think of brutal war against unfeeling enemies.”
“You think we can negotiate with these guys? Let them in and have a nice chat?”
Dabeet shook his head. “Opening the door or not opening the door will lead to everybody dying, or a lot of people dying, or at least a few people dying, depending on how it goes. You think I haven’t been living with this for the past months? I don’t want anybody to die. I may not have any friends here, Cynthia, but I don’t have any enemies, either. I don’t want anybody to die, and I especially don’t want them to die because some Earthside yiffa picked my mother as their hostage.”
“So you have a plan?” asked Monkey.
“I do not,” said Dabeet. “But if I did have a plan, it would depend on our having control of the mechanical stuff in the station, so we might be able to isolate them and cut off their air, or something that lets them inside but then we kill them all.”
“Oh, I see,” said Monkey. “That’s a good plan, except that you don’t actually have a plan.”
“I know I don’t,” said Dabeet. “But if I could get inside the mechanical area of the station, I might be able to learn enough about the way the station works that I could come up with a plan.”
“So why are you wandering around the whole inhabited portion of Fleet School instead of getting into the machinery?”
Dabeet buried his face in his hands. “Cynthia,” he said.
“Please call me Monkey,” she said. “I hate the name Cynthia.”
“Monkey,” said Dabeet, “what do you think I’ve been looking for? I can’t find a single door leading into the mechanicals. Why do you think I was looking at that stupid locked vent that I couldn’t possibly get my shoulders through?”
Monkey looked at him in something like awe. “You don’t know?” she said.
“Know what?” asked Dabeet.
“There are doors all over the place. They don’t all lead everywhere, but they all lead somewhere, and if you go into the right ones, you can get all over the station without having to go through some air duct.”
“There are no doors,” said Dabeet. “Not even trap doors in the ceilings.”
“This from the koncho who discovered that you could make boxes out of the wall panels in the battleroom,” said Monkey.
Dabeet thought about that for a moment. “Oh,” he said. “The doors don’t look like doors. They look like walls.”
“You got it.”
“I don’t like you calling me a koncho,” said Dabeet.
“It’s just a word,” said Monkey.
“A word that means ‘traitor,’” said Dabeet. “I’m trying my best not to betray the school or anybody. Except for the kay-quops who kidnapped me and threatened my mother. I’m trying really hard to think of a way to betray them.”
“So you’re a koncho coming and going,” said Monkey. “A double agent. Very thrilling. If either of us lives through this, they’ll make movies about you.”
“So how do I know which walls are really doors?”
“They’ll always be panels of interior walls, with rectangular shapes.”
Dabeet nodded. “But they don’t just open for children, do they?”
Monkey grinned. “They’re not supposed to, but I’m called Monkey, right? They have invisible palm panels, and our palms aren’t keyed in to open them. So they shouldn’t open for us.”
“But they do?”
Monkey nodded. “They put the palm panels up high, so only full-size humans can reach them. But some of the teachers aren’t all that tall. And if there were ever a hull breach and we had to get to spacesuits really quickly, those locking systems might kill us all. So I think that sometime along the way—maybe after it became Fleet School, maybe for most of the school’s history—they keyed the palm panels to open to any warm hand.”
“You’ve done this?”
“I got a friend to brace herself against the wall and I scrambled up her body and slapped my hand in the upper right-hand corner of the panel, and it popped open. Only a few centimeters, but it was enough to get my hand in and open it the rest of the way.”
“You did this once?”
“We did it to every panel that looked like it might be a door. We were bored and it was fun to explore. We closed them all up tight again, or the adults might have gotten wise to us and rekeyed the palm panels to keep us out.”
“Does everybody know about this except me?”
Monkey looked at him ruefully. “I don’t know. We didn’t tell people, but I’m sure people saw me do that scramble-up-and-palm-the-corner thing. And I can’t swear we always reclosed the doors. It’s a useful thing to have people know—for safety. Most of the doors have a dozen child-size atmo suits just inside. And a couple of adult ones.”
“So when these intruders arrive we could just get everybody to suit up and shut down the atmo,” said Dabeet.
“Not so easy,” said Monkey. “If the system is designed right, it can’t be shut down because it’s designed with redundancy to make sure nobody can sabotage the station.”
“Fine,” said Dabeet. “I never thought it would be easy.”
“You also never thought a door would look like a wall,” said Monkey.
“If I can get inside, maybe I’ll think of something that might actually work.”
“Maybe if we get inside the mechanical spaces, we’ll think of something that might work,” said Monkey.
“Yes,” said Dabeet. “We. Sorry.”
“I know how ships in space function,” said Monkey. “I know all the machinery and what it’s for. Not this machinery, but the kinds of machines.”
“And I don’t know any of it, except theoretically.”
“So you promise me,” said Monkey. “You will not change anything, you will not break anything, you will not touch anything unless I have explained the machine to you and I agree with whatever your plan is.”
It felt deeply wrong to Dabeet to have somebody else assert authority like that.
But she knew spaceships and Dabeet couldn’t even function well in null-gee. There was no arguing with that. “Agreed,” said Dabeet.
“No,
” said Monkey. “Words from your mouth. Whole sentences.”
“I vow on my mother’s life—because all of this is on my mother’s life—that I will not make any alterations, I will not do any sabotage, I will not break anything, I will not touch anything—except to keep my balance—without your giving me the go-ahead.”
“And you’ll explain your plan to me every single time, very specifically.”
“I will. What you said. I’ll tell you my whole plan, and then you’ll tell me why it won’t work the way I think, and then we’ll improve it together until it does work, or we’ll give up and think of something else.”
“And until I agree,” said Monkey, “you don’t do anything.”
Dabeet said, “Yes. I swear to that.”
“Then let me show you how to open the secret doors that everybody probably knows about except you.”
13
—Cynthia Munk’s response to the essay question “Please list and comment upon the five primary duties of an expedition leader.”
The leader of a planetary exploration team must be aware of the nature of every specialist’s work. The leader is not part of the redundancy system, because nobody can be a fully skilled practitioner of every specialty. But the leader has to know everyone’s work well enough to:
1. Understand all reports from every specialist.
2. Make sure specialists are attending to all their duties and not just the most interesting ones.
3. Know how and when to assign tasks and portions of tasks to others in the redundancy system when a particular specialist’s workload becomes too heavy to be competently performed.
4. Refrain from intervening in other people’s decisions and workload as long as they are performing competently.
5. Recognize when issues and problems are beyond the leader’s competence and then either consult with the entire team to work out solutions or determine whether the only viable solution is to shut down the station and return to space.
My only question about the leader’s responsibilities is this: What training will prepare the expedition leader to make the determination in situation 5? What are the consequences to a leader who pulls the plug, as per 5, when examination of the data by superior officers reveals that the leader made a wrong or unnecessarily costly decision? Are there careerist incentives to avoid taking any of the steps in 5? Likewise, are there careerist and/or ego incentives to cause a leader to incorrectly violate 3 and 4?