Ender's Shadow ew-6

by Orson Scott Card

  The tests went on. How many worlds did these bastards colonize before they got to Earth? Bean wondered. And are we sure we have them all? And what good does it do to destroy their fleets when we don't have the forces there to occupy the defeated colonies? Or do we just leave our ships there, shooting down anything that tries to boost from the surface of the planet?

  Petra wasn't the only one to blow out. Vlad went catatonic and couldn't be roused from his bunk. It took three days for the doctors to get him awake again, and unlike Petra, he was out for the duration. He just couldn't concentrate.

  Bean kept waiting for Crazy Tom to follow suit, but despite his nickname, he actually seemed to get saner as he got wearier. Instead it was Fly Molo who started laughing when he lost control of his squadron. Ender cut him off immediately, and for once he put Bean in charge of Fly's ships. Fly was back the next day, no explanation, but everyone understood that he wouldn't be given crucial assignments now.

  And Bean became more and more aware of Ender's decreasing alertness. His orders came after longer and longer pauses now, and a couple of times his orders weren't clearly stated. Bean immediately translated them into a more comprehensible form, and Ender never knew there had been confusion. But the others were finally becoming aware that Bean was following the whole battle, not just his part of it. Perhaps they even saw how Bean would ask a question during a battle, make some comment that alerted Ender to something that he needed to be aware of, but never in a way that sounded like Bean was criticizing anybody. After the battles one or two of the older kids would speak to Bean. Nothing major. Just a hand on his shoulder, on his back, and a couple of words. "Good game." "Good work." "Keep it up." "Thanks, Bean."

  He hadn't realized how much he needed the honor of others until he finally got it.

  ***

  "Bean, this next game, I think you should know something."

  "What?"

  Colonel Graff hesitated. "We couldn't get Ender awake this morning. He's been having nightmares. He doesn't eat unless we make him. He bites his hand in his sleep – bites it bloody. And today we couldn't get him to wake up. We were able to hold off on the ... test ... so he's going to be in command, as usual, but ... not as usual."

  "I'm ready. I always am."

  "Yeah, but ... look, advance word on this test is that it's ... there's no ..."

  "It's hopeless."

  "Anything you can do to help. Any suggestion."

  "This Dr. Device thing, Ender hasn't let us use it in a long time."

  "The enemy learned enough about how it works that they never let their ships get close enough together for a chain reaction to spread. It takes a certain amount of mass to be able to maintain the field. Basically, right now it's just ballast. Useless."

  "It would have been nice if you'd told me how it works before now."

  "There are people who don't want us to tell you anything, Bean. You have a way of using every scrap of information to guess ten times more than we want you to know. It makes them a little leery of giving you those scraps in the first place."

  "Colonel Graff, you know that I know that these battles are real. Mazer Rackham isn't making them up. When we lose ships, real men die."

  Graff looked away.

  "And these are men that Mazer Rackham knows, neh?"

  Graff nodded slightly.

  "You don't think Ender can sense what Mazer is feeling? I don't know the guy, maybe he's like a rock, but I think that when he does his critiques with Ender, he's letting his ... what, his anguish... Ender feels it. Because Ender is a lot more tired after a critique than before it. He may not know what's really going on, but he knows that something terrible is at stake. He knows that Mazer Rackham is really upset with every mistake Ender makes."

  "Have you found some way to sneak into Ender's room?"

  "I know how to listen to Ender. I'm not wrong about Mazer, am I?"

  Graff shook his head.

  "Colonel Graff, what you don't realize, what nobody seems to remember – that last game in Battle School, where Ender turned his army over to me. That wasn't a strategy. He was quitting. He was through. He was on strike. You didn't find that out because you graduated him. The thing with Bonzo finished him. I think Mazer Rackham's anguish is doing the same thing to him now. I think even when Ender doesn't consciously know that he's killed somebody, he knows it deep down, and it burns in his heart."

  Graff looked at him sharply.

  "I know Bonzo was dead. I saw him. I've seen death before, remember? You don't get your nose jammed into your brain and lose two gallons of blood and get up and walk away. You never told Ender that Bonzo was dead, but you're a fool if you think he doesn't know. And he knows, thanks to Mazer, that every ship we've lost means good men are dead. He can't stand it, Colonel Graff."

  "You're more insightful than you get credit for, Bean," said Graff.

  "I know, I'm the cold inhuman intellect, right?" Bean laughed bitterly. "Genetically altered, therefore I'm just as alien as the Buggers."

  Graff blushed. "No one's ever said that."

  "You mean you've never said it in front of me. Knowingly. What you don't seem to understand is, sometimes you have to just tell people the truth and ask them to do the thing you want, instead of trying to trick them into it."

  "Are you saying we should tell Ender the game is real?"

  "No! Are you insane? If he's this upset when the knowledge is unconscious, what do you think would happen if he knew that he knew? He'd freeze up."

  "But you don't freeze up. Is that it? You should command this next battle?"

  "You still don't get it, Colonel Graff. I don't freeze up because it isn't my battle. I'm helping. I'm watching. But I'm free. Because it's Ender's game."

  Bean's simulator came to life.

  "It's time," said Graff. "Good luck."

  "Colonel Graff, Ender may go on strike again. He may walk out on it. He might give up. He might tell himself, It's only a game and I'm sick of it, I don't care what they do to me, I'm done. That's in him, to do that. When it seems completely unfair and utterly pointless."

  "What if I promised him it was the last one?"

  Bean put on his headset as he asked, "Would it be true?"

  Graff nodded.

  "Yeah, well, I don't think it would make much difference. Besides, he's Mazer's student now, isn't he?"

  "I guess. Mazer was talking about telling him that it was the final exam."

  "Mazer is Ender's teacher now," Bean mused. "And you're left with me. The kid you didn't want."

  Graff blushed again. "That's right," he said. "Since you seem to know everything. I didn't want you."

  Even though Bean already knew it, the words still hurt.

  "But Bean," said Graff, "the thing is, I was wrong." He put a hand on Bean's shoulder and left the room.

  Bean logged on. He was the last of the squadron leaders to do so.

  "Are you there?" asked Ender over the headsets.

  "All of us," said Bean. "Kind of late for practice this morning, aren't you?"

  "Sorry," said Ender. "I overslept."

  They laughed. Except Bean.

  Ender took them through some maneuvers, warming up for the battle. And then it was time. The display cleared.

  Bean waited, anxiety gnawing at his gut.

  The enemy appeared in the display.

  Their fleet was deployed around a planet that loomed in the center of the display. There had been battles near planets before, but every other time, the world was near the edge of the display – the enemy fleet always tried to lure them away from the planet.

  This time there was no luring. Just the most incredible swarm of enemy ships imaginable. Always staying a certain distance away from each other, thousands and thousands of ships followed random, unpredictable, intertwining paths, together forming a cloud of death around the planet.

  This is the home planet, thought Bean. He almost said it aloud, but caught himself in time. This is a simulation of the Bugger def
ense of their home planet.

  They've had generations to prepare for us to come. All the previous battles were nothing. These Formics can lose any number of individual Buggers and they don't care. All that matters is the queen. Like the one Mazer Rackham killed in the Second Invasion. And they haven't put a queen at risk in any of these battles. Until now.

  That's why they're swarming. There's a queen here.

  Where?

  On the planet surface, thought Bean. The idea is to keep us from getting to the planet surface.

  So that's precisely where we need to go. Dr. Device needs mass. Planets have mass. Pretty simple.

  Except that there was no way to get this small force of human ships through that swarm and near enough to the planet to deploy Dr. Device. For if there was anything that history taught, it was this: Sometimes the other side is irresistibly strong, and then the only sensible course of action is to retreat in order to save your force to fight another day.

  In this war, however, there would be no other day. There was no hope of retreat. The decisions that lost this battle, and therefore this war, were made two generations ago when these ships were launched, an inadequate force from the start. The commanders who set this fleet in motion may not even have known, then, that this was the Buggers' home world. It was no one's fault. They simply didn't have enough of a force even to make a dent in the enemy's defenses. It didn't matter how brilliant Ender was. When you have only one guy with a shovel, you can't build a dike to hold back the sea.

  No retreat, no possibility of victory, no room for delay or maneuver, no reason for the enemy to do anything but continue to do what they were doing.

  There were only twenty starships in the human fleet, each with four fighters. And they were the oldest design, sluggish compared to some of the fighters they'd had in earlier battles. It made sense – the Bugger home world was probably the farthest away, so the fleet that got there now had left before any of the other fleets. Before the better ships came on line.

  Eighty fighters. Against five thousand, maybe ten thousand enemy ships. It was impossible to determine the number. Bean saw how the display kept losing track of individual enemy ships, how the total count kept fluctuating. There were so many it was overloading the system. They kept winking in and out like fireflies.

  A long time passed – many seconds, perhaps a minute. By now Ender usually had them all deployed, ready to move. But still there was nothing from him but silence.

  A light blinked on Bean's console. He knew what it meant. All he had to do was press a button, and control of the battle would be his. They were offering it to him, because they thought that Ender had frozen up.

  He hasn't frozen up, thought Bean. He hasn't panicked. He has simply understood the situation, exactly as I understand it. There is no strategy. Only he doesn't see that this is simply the fortunes of war, a disaster that can't be helped. What he sees is a test set before him by his teachers, by Mazer Rackham, a test so absurdly unfair that the only reasonable course of action is to refuse to take it.

  They were so clever, keeping the truth from him all this time. But now was it going to backfire on them. If Ender understood that it was not a game, that the real war had come down to this moment, then he might make some desperate effort, or with his genius he might even come up with an answer to a problem that, as far as Bean could see, had no solution. But Ender did not understand the reality, and so to him it was like that day in the battleroom, facing two armies, when Ender turned the whole thing over to Bean and, in effect, refused to play.

  For a moment Bean was tempted to scream the truth. It's not a game, it's the real thing, this is the last battle, we've lost this war after all! But what would be gained by that, except to panic everyone?

  Yet it was absurd to even contemplate pressing that button to take over control himself. Ender hadn't collapsed or failed. The battle was unwinnable; it should not even be fought. The lives of the men on those ships were not to be wasted on such a hopeless Charge of the Light Brigade. I'm not General Burnside at Fredericksburg. I don't send my men off to senseless, hopeless, meaningless death.

  If I had a plan, I'd take control. I have no plan. So for good or ill, it's Ender's game, not mine.

  And there was another reason for not taking over.

  Bean remembered standing over the supine body of a bully who was too dangerous to ever be tamed, telling Poke, Kill him now, kill him.

  I was right. And now, once again, the bully must be killed. Even though I don't know how to do it, we can't lose this war. I don't know how to win it, but I'm not God, I don't see everything. And maybe Ender doesn't see a solution either, but if anyone can find one, if anyone can make it happen, it's Ender.

  Maybe it isn't hopeless. Maybe there's some way to get down to the planet's surface and wipe the Buggers out of the universe. Now is the time for miracles. For Ender, the others will do their best work. If I took over, they'd be so upset, so distracted that even if I came up with a plan that had some kind of chance, it would never work because their hearts wouldn't be in it.

  Ender has to try. If he doesn't, we all die. Because even if they weren't going to send another fleet against us, after this they'll have to send one. Because we beat all their fleets in every battle till now. If we don't win this one, with finality, destroying their capability to make war against us, then they'll be back. And this time they'll have figured out how to make Dr. Device themselves.

  We have only the one world. We have only the one hope.

  Do it, Ender.

  There flashed into Bean's mind the words Ender said in their first day of training as Dragon Army: Remember, the enemy's gate is down. In Dragon Army's last battle, when there was no hope, that was the strategy that Ender had used, sending Bean's squad to press their helmets against the floor around the gate and win. Too bad there was no such cheat available now.

  Deploying Dr. Device against the planet's surface to blow the whole thing up, that might do the trick. You just couldn't get there from here.

  It was time to give up. Time to get out of the game, to tell them not to send children to do grownups' work. It's hopeless. We're done.

  "Remember," Bean said ironically, "the enemy's gate is down."

  Fly Molo, Hot Soup, Vlad, Dumper, Crazy Tom – they grimly laughed. They had been in Dragon Army. They remembered how those words were used before.

  But Ender didn't seem to get the joke.

  Ender didn't seem to understand that there was no way to get Dr. Device to the planet's surface.

  Instead, his voice came into their ears, giving them orders. He pulled them into a tight formation, cylinders within cylinders.

  Bean wanted to shout, Don't do it! There are real men on those ships, and if you send them in, they'll die, a sacrifice with no hope of victory.

  But he held his tongue, because, in the back of his mind, in the deepest corner of his heart, he still had hope that Ender might do what could not be done. And as long as there was such a hope, the lives of those men were, by their own choice when they set out on this expedition, expendable.

  Ender set them in motion, having them dodge here and there through the ever-shifting formations of the enemy swarm.

  Surely the enemy sees what we're doing, thought Bean. Surely they see how every third or fourth move takes us closer and closer to the planet.

  At any moment the enemy could destroy them quickly by concentrating their forces. So why weren't they doing it?

  One possibility occurred to Bean. The Buggers didn't dare concentrate their forces close to Ender's tight formation, because the moment they drew their ships that close together, Ender could use Dr. Device against them.

  And then he thought of another explanation. Could it be that there were simply too many Bugger ships? Could it be that the queen or queens had to spend all their concentration, all their mental strength just keeping ten thousand ships swarming through space without getting too close to each other?

  Unlike Ender, the Bugger q
ueen couldn't turn control of her ships over to subordinates. She had no subordinates. The individual Buggers; were like her hands and her feet. Now she had hundreds of hands and feet, or perhaps thousands of them, all wiggling at once.

  That's why she wasn't responding intelligently. Her forces were too numerous. That's why she wasn't making the obvious moves, setting traps, blocking Ender from taking his cylinder ever closer to the planet with every swing and dodge and shift that he made.

  In fact, the maneuvers the Buggers were making were ludicrously wrong. For as Ender penetrated deeper and deeper into the planet's gravity well, the Buggers were building up a thick wall of forces behind Ender's formation.

  They're blocking our retreat!

  At once Bean understood a third and most important reason for what was happening. The Buggers had learned the wrong lessons from the previous battles. Up to now, Ender's strategy had always been to ensure the survival of as many human ships as possible. He had always left himself a line of retreat. The Buggers, with their huge numerical advantage, were finally in a position to guarantee that the human forces would not get away.

  There was no way, at the beginning of this battle, to predict that the Buggers would make such a mistake. Yet throughout history, great victories had come as much because of the losing army's errors as because of the winner's brilliance in battle. The Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life. We don't throw our forces away because every soldier is the queen of a one-member hive. But they've learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong – for we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane.