They went on down to engineering, which was Carlotta’s bailiwick. While Ender persisted with the genetic research that was the whole reason for this voyage, Carlotta had become the onboard expert on mechanics, plasmatics, gravity lensing, and everything else to do with the workings of the ship. “It’s our world,” she often said, “we might as well know how it works.” And more recently she had bragged, “If I had to, I could build the whole thing from scratch.”

  “From parts, you mean,” Sergeant had said.

  “From ore in the mountains of some undiscovered planet,” said Carlotta. “From the metals in two asteroids and a comet. From the wreckage of this ship after a collision with a meteor.” Sergeant had laughed, but Ender believed her.

  Carlotta led the way back to the lower lab.

  “We could have walked down the corridor to the upper lab and skipped the whole trap door business,” Ender pointed out.

  “The Giant can hear our footsteps from the upper lab.”

  “Do you think he can’t hear everything, everywhere?”

  “I know he can’t,” said Carlotta. “There are dead spots all over the ship where he can’t hear anything.”

  “That you know about.”

  Carlotta didn’t bother to answer. They both knew that Ender didn’t actually care whether the Giant heard them or not—it was Sergeant who had to conceal everything, or at least believe that he was concealing himself.

  Aft of the lower lab was the elevator shaft that led back to life support. During strong acceleration phases, the back of the ship became the bottom of a deep well, and the elevator made it possible to go down to life support at the base—and back up again. But in flight, gravity was polarized the other direction, so that the elevator became a simple walkway, at ten percent of Earth normal, leading aft to life support.

  The payload area of the ship, where the Giant lived because he couldn’t fit anywhere else, was directly above them. So they walked slowly and lightly, being careful to make no noise. If Sergeant heard them, he’d be furious because it meant the Giant could hear them, too.

  Sergeant wasn’t in life support, though he had the fans running full blast to pump freshly oxygenated air through the ducts and muffle sound. Ender could never decide whether it smelled like fresh air or decay—the lichens and algae that lived in hundreds of large trays under fake sunlight were constantly dying, their protoplasm then getting incorporated into the next generation in a continuous cycle.

  “You know what this place needs?” said Carlotta. “A dead fish. To improve the smell.”

  “You don’t know what a dead fish smells like,” said Ender. “We’ve never seen a fish.”

  “I’ve seen pictures, and all the books say fish smell bad when they rot.”

  “Worse than rotting algae,” said Ender.

  “You don’t know that,” said Carlotta.

  “If rotting algae smelled worse, then the saying would be, ‘Algae and visitors begin to stink after three days.’”

  “None of us knows what we’re talking about,” said Carlotta.

  “And yet we keep talking,” said Ender.

  Ender expected to find Sergeant in the Puppy—the maintenance craft that was programmed by the Giant to remain within five meters of the surface of Herodotus no matter what contrary instructions it might be given. Ender knew Carlotta had tried for months to untether the Puppy, but she couldn’t defeat the programming.

  Things like that made it clear to Ender, if to neither of the others, that the Giant was every bit as smart as they were, and he had years of experience behind him. All of Sergeant’s precautions were pointless, because at his oversized console in the payload area, the Giant could do whatever he wanted, hear and see and probably smell whatever he wanted, and his children could do nothing about it, nor even detect his spying.

  The others refused to believe it, but Ender understood that they were children. Anton’s Key meant their brains were still growing—and so was the Giant’s brain. His capacity was so far beyond theirs by now that it was a joke to think of outsmarting him. But such was Sergeant’s competitive nature that he not only believed he could outsmart the Giant, he believed he already had.

  Delusional. One of your children is insane, O Giant, and it isn’t me and it isn’t the girl. What are you going to do about it?

  All right, not insane. Just … warlike. While Carlotta studied the engineering of the ship and Ender studied the human genome and methods of altering it, Sergeant studied weapons, wars, and means of death. He came by it naturally—the Giant had been a great military commander on Earth, perhaps the best that ever lived, though if he was, Mother had not been far behind him. Bean and Petra—the most powerful weapons in the Hegemon’s arsenal as he united the world under a single government. It was only to be expected that some of their children would be warriors at heart, and that was Sergeant.

  Even Carlotta was more warlike than Ender. Ender hated violence, hated confrontation. He just wanted to do his work and be left alone. He could see one of his sibs do something remarkable and he had no urge to match or surpass them—on the contrary, he was proud of them, or frightened for them, depending on whether he approved of whatever stunt they were attempting.

  Carlotta removed a narrow panel from near the ceiling of the access shaft.

  “Oh, not really,” said Ender.

  “We fit just fine,” said Carlotta. “You’re not claustrophobic, are you?”

  “It’s the gravity lensing field,” said Ender. “And it’s active.”

  “It’s just gravity. Ten percent of Earth. And we’re sandwiched between two plates, it’s not like we can fall.”

  “I hate the way it feels.” They had played in that space when they were two-year-olds. It was like spinning around until you were dizzy. Only worse.

  “Get over it,” said Carlotta. “We’ve tested it, and sound really does get nullified in here.”

  “Right,” said Ender. “How are we going to hear each other speak?”

  “Tin can telephones,” said Carlotta.

  Of course they weren’t the toy sound transmitters that they had made when they were really little. Carlotta had long since reengineered them so that, without any power source, they transmitted sound cleanly along ten meters of fine wire, even around corners or pinched in doors.

  Sure enough, there was Sergeant, his eyes closed, “meditating”—which Ender interpreted to mean that Sergeant was plotting how he would take over all the human worlds before he died of giantism at age twenty.

  “Nice of you to come,” said Sergeant. Ender couldn’t hear him, but he could read his lips and besides, he already knew it was exactly what Sergeant was likely to say.

  Soon they were hooked up in a three-way connection with Carlotta’s tin cans. They all had to lie in a line with their heads turned, Ender between Carlotta and Sergeant so he couldn’t decide to end the conversation and slither out.

  As soon as Ender crept into the gravity field, he had felt that sense of plunging over the top of a waterfall or leaping off a bridge. Down down down, said his sense of balance. Falling! warned his limbic node, all in a panic. For the first few minutes in the gravity field, Ender couldn’t stop himself from flailing about in the startle reflex every ten seconds or so, but that’s why Carlotta taped his tin can to his face, so he couldn’t knock it away in one of his paroxysms.

  “Get on with it,” said Ender grimly. “I’ve got work to do and this place feels like continuous death.”

  “It’s thrilling,” said Sergeant. “Humans spend money to get inside a gravity field for the adrenaline rush, and here we get this one for free.”

  Ender said nothing. The more he demanded that they hurry, the more Sergeant would digress and delay.

  “For once I agree with Ender,” said Carlotta. “I programmed turbulence into the lens and it’s getting to me.”

  So Ender was right that it felt worse than usual. For only the ten-thousandth time in his life, Ender wished he had beaten the kuso out of Sergeant when they first met. It would have established a different pecking order.

  Instead, Ender had paid attention when Mother kept telling him about how the other kids were “just as much our genuine children as you,” even though Ender had actually been born from Mother’s body and the other kids had been implanted in the wombs of surrogates.

  For the normal kids, that was no big deal—they would have no memories of living anywhere else. But the antonines, Sergeant and Carlotta, were aware of everything at six months instead of three years. They remembered their surrogate families and felt like strangers with Mother and Father.

  Ender could have bullied and bossed them, but he didn’t. He tried not to imply that he thought of himself as the “real” child, though at the age of twelve months, of course he felt that way. Sergeant’s reaction to the strange situation was to assert himself and try to take control. He must have been hell for his surrogate parents in the first year of his life. They would have had no idea what to do with a child who talked in full sentences by six months, who climbed everywhere and got into everything by nine months, who was teaching himself to read at age one.

  Carlotta, on the other hand, was reticent; her surrogate parents might not have known just how much she could do at such an early age. When Father and Mother brought her home, she responded to the new situation with shyness, and she and Ender quickly became friends. Sergeant, feeling threatened, had to turn everything into a contest—or a fight.

  Ender mostly evaded Sergeant’s belligerency. Unfortunately, Sergeant took that to mean submission. Except when he took it as arrogance. “You don’t compete because you think you’ve already won everything.”

  Ender didn’t think he’d won. He just thought of competition with Sergeant as a distraction. A waste of time. It’s not fun playing with somebody who absolutely has to win, every single time.

  “The Giant is taking a long time to die,” said Sergeant.

  In that instant, Ender understood the entire meeting. Sergeant was getting impatient. He was son of the king and ready to inherit. How many times had this script been acted out in human history?

  “So what do you propose?” asked Ender neutrally. “Evacuate the air from the payload area? Poison his water or his food? Or will you insist we all hold knives and stab him to death?”

  “Don’t be melodramatic,” said Sergeant. “The bigger he gets, the harder it will be to deal with the carcass.”

  “Open the cargo bay and jettison it into space,” said Carlotta.

  “No,” said Sergeant. “More than half our nutrients are tied up in his body and it’s beginning to affect life support. We have to be able to reclaim those nutrients so we have something to eat and breathe as we get larger.”

  “So we cut him up into steaks?” asked Ender.

  “I knew you’d react that way,” said Sergeant mildly. “We won’t eat him, not directly, we’ll slice him and put him in the trays. The bacteria will dissolve him and the lichen will have a growth spurt.”

  “And then double rations for everybody,” said Ender.

  “All I propose is that we stop feeding him his full daily calories. By the time he notices, he’ll have become so feeble that he can’t do anything about it.”

  “He won’t want to,” said Ender. “As soon as he realizes we’re trying to kill him, he’ll want to die.”

  “Melodrama!” said Sergeant. “Nobody wants to die, unless they’re insane. The Giant wants to live. And he isn’t sentimental like you, Ender. He’ll kill us before he’ll let us kill him.”

  “Don’t assume that the Giant is as evil as you,” said Ender.

  Carlotta tugged on his foot. “Play nice, Ender,” she said.

  Ender knew how this would play out. Carlotta would express her regret but she’d agree with Sergeant. If Ender tried to give the Giant extra calories, Sergeant would beat him and Carlotta would stand by, or even help hold him. Not that the beatings ever lasted long. Ender just had no interest in fighting, so he didn’t defend himself. After a few blows, he always gave in.

  But this was different. The Giant was dying anyway. That caused Ender enough anguish that the idea of hastening the process was unbearable.

  Nothing unbearable had ever been proposed before. So Ender’s reaction surprised even him. No, especially him.

  Sergeant’s head was right there, just above Ender’s own. Ender reached up, and with all the power of his arms, he rammed Sergeant’s head into the wall.

  Sergeant’s hands immediately snaked out to begin the battle, but Ender had taken him by surprise—no one had ever actively hurt Sergeant before, and he wasn’t used to dealing with pain. By the time Sergeant’s hands were groping for Ender’s arms, Ender’s legs were braced on both sides of the field containment shaft and he was ramming the heel of his hand full strength into Sergeant’s nose.

  Blood sprayed out and floated in globules that “fell” in every direction in the turbulent gravity field.

  Sergeant’s grip faltered. This was serious pain. Ender could hear him shouting in fury into the tin can.

  Ender shaped his hand into a fist and drove a knuck into Sergeant’s eye.

  Sergeant screamed.

  Carlotta twisted on Ender’s foot, shouting, “What are you doing? What’s going on?”

  Ender braced himself against her grip and drove the edge of his hand into Sergeant’s throat.

  Sergeant choked and gasped.

  Ender did it again.

  Sergeant stopped breathing, his eyes bugging out in terror.

  Ender pulled himself along until his mouth was over Sergeant’s. He locked their lips together and blew into Sergeant’s mouth, hard. He got blood and snot from Sergeant’s nose inside his mouth when he did, but he couldn’t avoid that; he hadn’t yet decided whether to kill Sergeant. The rational part of Ender’s mind, which had always been in control till now, was beginning to reassert itself.

  “Here’s how it’s going to be,” said Ender. “Your reign of terror is over. You proposed murder and you meant it.”

  “He didn’t mean it,” said Carlotta.

  Ender lashed back with his foot and caught her in the mouth. She cried out and then just cried.

  “He meant it and you would have helped him with it,” said Ender. “I’ve put up with this goffno till now but now you crossed the line. Sergeant, you’re not in charge of anything. If you try to give orders to anybody again, I’ll kill you. Do you understand me?”

  “Ender, he’ll kill you now!” cried Carlotta through her tears. “What’s happened to you?”

  “Sergeant will not kill me,” said Ender. “Because Sergeant knows that I just became his commanding officer. He’s been dying to have one, and the Giant wouldn’t do it, so I will. Since you don’t have a conscience of your own, Sergeant, you will have mine from now on. You don’t do anything violent or dangerous without my permission. If you catch yourself thinking about harming me or anyone else, I’ll know it because I can read your body like a big-print book.”

  “No you can’t,” said Carlotta.

  “I can read the human body the way you read the machinery on the ship, Carlotta,” said Ender. “I always know what Sergeant’s planning, I just never cared enough to stop him until now. When the Giant dies, of his own accord, in his own good time, then we will probably do something like what you proposed, Sergeant, because we can’t lose the nutrients. But we don’t need those nutrients now and we won’t need them for years. Meanwhile, I’ll do all I can to keep the Giant alive.”

  “You would never kill me,” croaked Sergeant.

  “Patricide is a thousand times worse than fratricide,” said Ender, “and I won’t even hesitate. You didn’t have to cross this line, but you did, and I think you knew what I’d do. I think you wanted me to do it. I think you’re terrified by the fact that nobody ever stopped you from doing anything. Well, this is your lucky day. I’m stopping you from now on. You and your weapons and your war games—I learned how to damage the human body and I can promise you, Sergeant, I have permanently changed your voice and your nose. Every time you look in the mirror, every time you hear yourself talk, you’ll remember—Ender is in charge and Sergeant will do as Ender tells him. Got it?”

  As punctuation, Ender wrung Sergeant’s nose, which was definitely broken.

  Sergeant cried out, but that hurt his throat terribly and he gurgled and choked and spat.

  “The Giant’s going to ask what happened to Sergeant,” Carlotta said.

  “He won’t have to ask,” said Ender. “I’m going to repeat our conversation to him, verbatim, and the two of you will be there to listen. Now, Carlotta, back down this shaft so I can drag Sergeant’s miserable body out to where we can get the bleeding stopped.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Seeing the Future

  Bean looked at his three children and it was only with effort that he concealed the depth of his grief and fear for them. He had known it was only a matter of time, and while he was relieved that Ender had finally woken out of his long pacifist slumber to end Sergeant’s domination, he knew that they had only set the scene for conflict to come. What will happen when I’m gone? thought Bean.

  Petra, I have botched this completely, but I don’t know how I could have done it better. They’ve had too much freedom, but I couldn’t chase them through corridors where my body no longer fit.

  “Andrew,” said Bean, “I appreciate your loyalty to me, and the fact that you repeated all conversations verbatim, including the incredibly stupid and dangerous things you said.”

  Bean watched as Ender blushed a little—not from embarrassment, but from anger. He also saw how Carlotta looked a little relieved, and Cincinnatus—Bean had always hated the nickname “Sergeant”—got a sudden look of triumphant hope. These children had no idea how transparent they were to him. Learning to read other people took time, no matter how clever a child might be.

  Though they might be better at it than Bean supposed. What if they knew exactly what emotions they were showing now, and let them show deliberately?