“Does it matter? We’re all feral children, and by ‘we’ I mean the entire human race and all of its variants. We’ve only just started to evolve into creatures that actually like and need civilization. We all have to suppress the aggressive alpha male and the savagely protective mother so that we can live together in close proximity.”

  “As we do on this ship,” said Carlotta.

  “I’ll look for a pet for Sergeant.”

  “And for you,” said Carlotta. “And me. And who knows? Maybe Father would thrive if he had some life outside this ship.”

  “That’s a lot of bandwidth, to keep us all playing with animals on other planets.”

  “We can afford to pay for it,” said Carlotta.

  “I’ll look into it,” said Ender.

  “Pretend that it matters,” said Carlotta, “and that there’s some urgency to it.”

  Ender said nothing more. He closed the lid on his last sample and left life support.

  Carlotta was already finished with her readings. As usual, everything was working fine.

  What routine, boring, lonely job was next? She hadn’t checked the tracking software for a while. Weeks? Days? At least days. She closed up the floor panel over the gravitational field sensors and made her way to the elevator shaft.

  When she first stepped onto the platform, it was a small floor under her feet. But as it moved upward, it passed into a flux zone, where she felt herself falling in every direction. She was used to it, though it still gave her a bit of an adrenaline rush as her body felt the usual momentary panic. The limbic node deep in her brain didn’t understand that she no longer lived in a tree, no longer had to panic when she felt herself to be falling.

  She kept her grip on the handle of the elevator and soon she came into the zone that kept Father’s gravity oriented so that life support was toward the rear of the ship and not the bottom. In this gravity zone, the elevator shaft ran along the bottom of the ship—the keel, to use the nautical analogy—so that the cargo hold where Father lived was above her, and she was lying on her back, clinging to the handle as the elevator slid her forward. It was easy enough to hold on—Father’s gravity was about like the Moon’s, a tenth of what it was on Earth.

  Ender was in the lower lab when she got there. It took her a couple of steps to move fully into the zone of Earth-normal gravity that the ship maintained in the forward compartments, where Father couldn’t go anyway. Ender didn’t look up—he was busy inserting his samples into various bits of equipment, some of them for freezing, some to be worked with right away. He had no time for her.

  She envied him his sense of urgency. Unlike Sergeant’s crisis, Ender’s urgency was real enough—the deadlines loomed. Carlotta didn’t believe for a moment that there was any chance of saving Father’s life, but there was some hope for the three children, and Ender never lost track of that. In her heart, she knew that Ender was the only one of the children engaged in work that was truly important to them all. But he and Father were so immersed in it, had such a firm grasp on the state of the research, that she despaired of ever learning it well enough to be a colleague of theirs, an equal. She would always be the latecomer.

  And yet she would drop all her work if they called for her, asked her to do any task, however menial. Here, tend to this while we do the real work—she wouldn’t mind. But they never called for her help.

  Wordlessly she passed Ender and climbed up into the upper lab. She sat down at the terminal for the tracking computer, brought up the holocharts, and began going through all the star systems that fell anywhere near their future path, starting with the stars they were just about to pass and working forward. The computer was looking for the arrangement of mass in each system in order to estimate how the gravitator would have to adjust its lensing.

  It was on the fortieth star she looked at—one that was still several months in their future, but would come fairly near to them—that the computer pointed out an anomaly. There was an object that was being tracked as belonging to that star system, but according to the computer report, the object’s mass kept changing.

  That was impossible, of course, a mere artifact of the data. The mass didn’t change, that’s simply how it was reported. What was actually happening was that the object was not moving on a path that was predictable in relation with the known masses of the star and its larger planets. So the software kept adjusting the estimate of the object’s mass to make it conform to its most recent movements.

  It wasn’t an “object” at all. It was using its own power to move on a path it chose itself, independent of the gravity of the star and its planets.

  Carlotta told the software to regard the object as a starship.

  Immediately she got a very different report of its past movements. The ship now had a constant mass—more than a thousand times more massive than the Herodotus. But the trajectory now made perfect sense. The ship was slowing down as it entered the star system. It was heading, not toward the star, but toward a rocky planet in the goldilocks zone.

  Even the largest human colony ships were not so large, but they would have homed in on exactly that kind of planet. If the Herodotus were on a planet-scouting mission, that planet would have set off all the appropriate alarms. As it was, Herodotus routinely sent all the astronomical data it collected by ansible to the keepers of the master charts. Originally they were maintained by the International Fleet, but in recent centuries Starways Congress oversaw the constant updates.

  The preliminary report Herodotus already sent had tagged the planet as having 1.2 gees of mass. In the goldilocks zone that meant it would definitely have an atmosphere, though, having held on to more of its hydrogen than Earth had, and lacking a twin planet like Earth’s Moon, the composition of the atmosphere could not yet be predicted. As they got nearer in the next quarter century or so, Earth time, more information about the atmospherics would be collected and transmitted.

  But Carlotta didn’t care much about the planet. Planets were of no use to them because Father couldn’t stand even half a gee, let alone 1.2. The fact that the alien ship was approaching it suggested that the atmosphere was attractive to whatever species the ship belonged to. But what mattered to Herodotus was the existence of the alien ship.

  A starfaring species could not navigate through space without having instruments that would detect Herodotus as it passed by. The ramscoop and the plasma emissions were potentially dangerous to the alien ship and it might feel threatened, even though they were not on a collision trajectory.

  Since the alien ship was slowing to approach a planet, Carlotta had no way of guessing whether the alien ship itself, or perhaps a smaller craft it carried inside it, had the speed to accelerate and match that of Herodotus.

  They had several choices, now that she knew it was an alien ship. The Herodotus could turn aside slightly to avoid passing so near to the star system. This would not conceal their passage from the alien ship, but it would make it less likely that the aliens would feel any need to intercept them; their plasma emissions and mass collection would have no effect on any object reasonably construed as being a part of that star system.

  But turning, however slightly, would require a significant slowing of the Herodotus. Objects traveling as close to lightspeed as they were going simply could not turn. They would have to slow to less than eighty percent of lightspeed to bend their path even slightly; to make a turn of a degree or more, they would have to halve their velocity.

  That would return them to the normal flow of time. The relativistic effects of near-lightspeed flight were not noticeable at lower speeds. That meant that genetic research in the human worlds would stop proceeding by leaps and bounds, relative to the Herodotus, but would plod along at the rate of at most two days per day, and probably less.

  Would that matter? Nobody in the human worlds was working directly on Anton’s Key anymore, anyway—only Father and Ender were doing that, and their work would not be slowed at all by a change in the ship’s velocity. There might be some breakthrough in related research that was postponed for a while, but in more than four centuries, all such breakthroughs had been incremental at best. Interesting lines of research had opened up, but nothing truly vital had happened.

  But Carlotta knew they were not limited to these two choices—continue at near-lightspeed in a straight line, or slow down enough to bend their course and then return to lightspeed as quickly as possible. There was a third choice. They could stop and meet the alien ship.

  Dangerous. Potentially fatal. The human race had encountered only one alien species, ever, and had fought a war of extinction with them. According to a story told by the writer of The Hive Queen under the pseudonym “Speaker for the Dead,” the Formics had not meant to wipe out the human race at all. But Carlotta wasn’t buying it—it was easy to impute benign motives to an alien species that no longer existed.

  So to slow down and meet this alien species was extremely dangerous—potentially lethal. The first Formic colony ship to enter Earth’s solar system had been lethal. Both the early encounters out in the Kuiper belt and then the asteroid belt, and then the landing on Earth when the Formics tried to replace Earth’s biota with their own, had killed thousands of humans. The war to save Earth had been a close-fought thing and the outcome had by no means been certain until the very end.

  Formic technology had been more advanced than human tech, but there were gaps in the Formic mindset that humans exploited to defeat that first colonizing effort. By the time the International Fleet had reached all the Formic colony worlds, the technologies had become about even, except that humans had the molecular disruption field used in the ramscoops. Weaponized, the M.D. field was used to utterly destroy the Formic home world and, with it, all the Hive Queens.

  What if this group of aliens had a technology as deadly to humans as the M.D. field had been to the Formics? Even if the technologies were more balanced, what if they were more malicious and relentless than the Formics had been?

  The trouble was, it was too late to avoid meeting them. No matter what the Herodotus did, it would be detected—and its plasma path could be followed back till it disappeared. And since their flight had been straight as an arrow since they reached near-lightspeed, all the aliens would have to do to find the human home world was keep on going straight along the path marked by the Herodotus’s plasma emission trail even after the trail itself petered out.

  The Giant and his children had a mission of their own—to stay at lightspeed while they worked to save their own variant on the human species. To save their own lives, if they could.

  But what was the point, if the rest of the human race got wiped out in the meanwhile?

  It would be far more useful to slow down and stop, not turn, so that they could discover as much as possible about this alien ship and its inhabitants. Using the ansible, they could report every speck of information they found—right up to the moment when the aliens destroyed them. The human race would then have time to make whatever preparations might be possible to meet these aliens when they followed the Herodotus’s trail back to Earth.

  And there was always the chance that this alien species would have weaker technology than the Herodotus. Maybe they would be friendly. Maybe they would be downright worshipful.

  No matter what, however, it was highly likely, in Carlotta’s view at least, that the whole human race might have cause to be grateful to this little ship of antonines—or leguminotes, to follow Ender’s little joke on Father’s name. For if the human race could pick their first ambassadors to this new alien species, they could hardly do better than to choose the great warrior Julian Delphiki and his three astonishingly brilliant children. If any humans were a match for these aliens, it would be the doomed geniuses on this lonely little ship.

  And it would give Sergeant something useful to occupy his time instead of plotting ways to kill Father—or whoever his enemy might be today.

  Carlotta sent a signal to Ender and Sergeant. COME WITH ME TO TALK TO THE GIANT. SOMETHING IMPORTANT HAS COME UP. Then she copied the pertinent charts and reports to Father’s holotop.

  CHAPTER 4

  Strangers Are Enemies

  If it had been the Giant or Ender who called him, Cincinnatus might have ignored the summons. But he had nothing against Carlotta. She had respect enough for him not to waste his time. Ender and the Giant both assumed that whatever Sergeant was doing, it was worthless and therefore interruptible.

  The cargo hold had always been the Giant’s sleeping quarters, but Sergeant remembered the days when the Giant used to venture out into the labs and the helm. But only a year or so into the voyage, the Giant had grown too large even for the passages especially redesigned to accommodate his bulk. Cincinnatus remembered how sad it had made him, when the Giant became a prisoner in the cargo hold.

  The last time Sergeant had been in here, he had been in pain from Ender’s treacherous attack. Now the pain was gone and most of the symptoms had faded. Ender was now acting as nonchalant as if the incident had never happened. To him, it was probably forgotten already, too trivial to be worth thinking about.

  But Cincinnatus thought about it all the time. The rage and shame of it still burned. He had to do something to make that pain go away, but he had no idea what. He certainly wasn’t going to attack one of his sibs—that road led to the death of their new species before it had a fair chance to thrive. Ender might regard Cincinnatus’s genes as disposable, but Cincinnatus knew that Ender was the best of them, the one whose genes were most vital to pass on to another generation. No matter how angry he might get, Cincinnatus did not lose track of what mattered.

  At Carlotta’s request, the Giant had linked his holotop to the big holodisplay, and now she pointed out the movement of an alien ship in a star system they were approaching.

  He did not need Carlotta to point out their choices.

  “Of course we’re going to stop and try to communicate with them,” said Cincinnatus. “We have no other choice. We can’t leave a potential threat behind us without investigating it.”

  The others nodded. A group this bright didn’t need discussion when the options were obvious.

  “There’s no reason for Ender to stop working on the genetics problem,” said the Giant. “We’re pursuing an interesting path that involves bacterial latency. Carlotta can manage deceleration, approach, and communications.”

  Cincinnatus felt his normal despair. As usual, no one could think of anything for him to do.

  Carlotta, bless her little heart, took pity on him. He hated that. He didn’t need to have his shame put into words. “What about Sergeant?”

  The Giant looked at her as if she were an idiot. “He’s going to arm the Herodotus so we’re ready to turn this alien ship into dust if the need arises.”

  Just like that. For the first time in his life, Cincinnatus mattered. The Giant had a use for him.

  Ender was skeptical, of course. “We don’t want to go in guns blazing.”

  The Giant sighed, and now Ender got the are-you-really-this-dim look. “Andrew, sometimes I think you forget that each of you is exactly as intelligent as the others. Cincinnatus isn’t going to use any weapons against an enemy whose capabilities we don’t yet know. And even when we know them, he won’t initiate hostilities. We don’t need a war. We need an assessment. But if they want a fight, we have to be so ready that only a vastly superior technology could possibly kill or capture us.”

  Cincinnatus didn’t have to say a thing. He had a job. An important one. And more to the point, he had the Giant’s trust.

  Enough trust that over the next few weeks, the Giant studied all of Cincinnatus’s proposals and, with a few pointers and suggestions, approved them. Carlotta helped him put a small-scale M.D. field on the front of the Puppy, to act as a shield and, potentially, a weapon. Cincinnatus put in the hours of delicate work to weaponize the small atmospheric probes, designing them to cause several different levels of damage. It was vital to have an arsenal that could respond at the appropriate level. Total destruction was the least desirable option. How many alien races were they likely to meet on this voyage? It would be very nice to have something left to study, even if they had to kill everybody. Turning the aliens and their ship into a cloud of undifferentiated atoms was only the very last resort.

  This was what Cincinnatus had trained himself for. It had seemed obvious to him from the start of his self-education. The Giant had survived on the streets of Rotterdam, finding ways to protect himself against enemies far larger and more capable than himself through a combination of cleverness, ruthlessness, and well-placed trust. Then, when Sister Carlotta found him, the Giant had gone to Battle School and become the very best at everything.

  Cincinnatus had gone over the transcripts of the great battles that the Giant had taken part in under the command of Ender Wiggin, and again and again he saw that the Giant was the best. Wiggin had clearly understood this, relying on the Giant to take the most difficult assignments and trusting his counsel.

  One brother was named for Andrew Wiggin. So be it—the Giant had loved him and served him well. The Giant called his daughter Carlotta, after the nun who rescued him, saw his value, and sent him off to war. But Cincinnatus was not named for someone out of the Giant’s own past. Cincinnatus was named for the great Roman general who saved his country and then set down his power and returned to the farm to live out his life in peace.

  That was what the Giant dreamed of—that’s what this voyage was to him. An attempt to end his life in peace, to devote himself to saving the lives of his children.

  To Cincinnatus, it was as clear an assignment as he could imagine. You are the soldier, the Giant was saying to him. You will follow my path to war. I have set down my military life; I give it to you.

  So Cincinnatus relentlessly studied war, everything about war, from weaponry to tactics, from strategy to logistics. Every period, every battle, every general good or bad. He saw everything through the lens of war. He made himself ready.