And what did he get for it? The nickname “Sergeant,” as if he were a mere noncom, never to be a commander.

  But Cincinnatus bore the name and their disdain. He persisted in his path, reassuring himself that the Giant suffered worse abuse as the smallest child on the streets of Rotterdam and later, the smallest in Battle School. The Giant is testing me. I will show him that nothing bends me and certainly nothing breaks me.

  The Giant consulted with the other two all the time, Ender about genetics, Carlotta about the ship. Cincinnatus was left to himself. He had despaired. He had tried to decipher, from the silence, what the Giant wanted of him. He had finally reached the conclusion that the Giant did not believe that it was possible to reverse Anton’s Key. The Giant had failed in this last assignment. Like a Roman who failed in a great endeavor, there was nothing to do but sit in a bath and open a vein. Except that was not a soldier’s way. A great soldier like the Giant would have another soldier put a sword through him and die as if in battle.

  That’s how it had seemed to Cincinnatus. But apparently he was wrong.

  How could I be anything but wrong? he had cried out silently to the Giant. You never talked to me, you never told me what you wanted, I followed your path so closely that I could repeat every battle you ever fought from memory. But you left me to guess. You left me without any hint that you valued me or my work. You left me as alone as you were on the streets of the city.

  When Ender bloodied his nose and damaged his throat—and could have killed him—Cincinnatus despaired. He felt like the prodigal son, who had claimed his inheritance and wasted it, and now was a mere servant in the Giant’s house.

  Only then, at the lowest point in his wasted young life, did the enemy appear on the far horizon. Then the Giant looked to his military heir and anointed him. Of course he is the one who will create our weapons! Of course he is the one who will prepare for war.

  And Cincinnatus was ready. He had already planned how to weaponize practically everything on the ship. He had created the programs that would aim the plasma exhaust ports to fry anything that approached the Herodotus. He had created programs to turn the ramscoop into a true ram that would create a molecular disruption field to consume anything they came near. Cincinnatus had long since penetrated all the data banks of the old International Fleet and the new Starways Congress, and he was confident that if the need came, he could defeat, one on one, any warship that the human race could bring against him.

  For he had always assumed that their greatest danger would eventually come from humans who had decided that the leguminotes must be obliterated before they could supplant Homo sapiens as the dominant life-form in the universe.

  Instead it was an alien ship, and Cincinnatus had the Giant’s trust as they decelerated to meet it. He should have felt exultant, vindicated.

  All he felt was relief and a little bitterness: Finally! And you couldn’t give me a hint that you needed a warrior son till now?

  The relief and the bitterness quickly faded, however, and now he had to face the realization that all he felt, day after day, was a growing dread. No, not dread anymore. Raw fear, that’s what he felt. All his military study and planning had been theoretical or historical. This was real.

  If Cincinnatus did not do well, they all could die. If he was too quick to use lethal force, he could bring on devastating retaliation; but if he delayed too long, a preemptive strike by the enemy could destroy them with his weapons unused. If he could not deal with unexpected enemy tactics on the fly, they could die.

  The Giant had always had the luxury of never having the full weight of command on his shoulders. Always there was Ender above him, or, later, Peter the Hegemon. Cincinnatus had the Giant, but the Giant had retired to his farm. The Giant was slow, and the stress of battle might overtax his heart. He might die. Cincinnatus had to prepare to fight alone to keep his brother and sister—his kin and his kind—alive.

  When Ender made a mistake or followed a dead end, he just sighed and started again. Nothing lost but time.

  But if Cincinnatus made a mistake, they might all be dead.

  There were no trial runs. There were no games and tests. How could there be? When the Giant was in Battle School, the Formics were known. There was something to train for. But these new aliens—nothing was known. How could he train himself?

  Cincinnatus found himself freezing up. He would be in the middle of a task and suddenly he would realize that he had done absolutely nothing for a half hour, an hour at a time. Instead his mind had kept racing through imaginary scenarios, always disastrous, always his fault. He would choke, he would freeze, he would panic and leave his sibs at the mercy of the enemy.

  They were all counting on him, and from what they could see he was completely ready. The ship was outfitted for war, the software was tested and it worked perfectly. What they could not know was that inside his own head, Cincinnatus was crazy with fear.

  I’ll just tell them. I’ll tell the Giant. I can’t do this. I’m not your heir. I’m a sorry mistake. A failure. If it comes to war, you can’t count on me to do anything at all.

  He made the resolution over and over. He went to the Giant to tell him. Instead they talked over old battles. Why did you do this? Why did Ender Wiggin do that?

  The Giant seemed to enjoy this. “The thing about Ender Wiggin was that he understood the enemy. The boys he fought against in Battle School, and the Formics themselves. He didn’t know he was fighting the Formics, of course. He thought his opponent was Mazer Rackham, the one human being who had figured out the Hive Queens and used his knowledge to win the Second Formic War. So he fought Mazer Rackham as if he were a Hive Queen, and he believed Rackham was simply doing a superb job of faking the Formic way of war. So Ender tried to understand, not Mazer Rackham himself, but the Formics he was supposedly simulating.”

  “You were doing it too, weren’t you?” asked Cincinnatus.

  “No,” said the Giant. “I was young then. I hated the enemy, I let my fear of the enemy drive me. What will he do, where will he move, what can he do, I must be ready to counter it. And I was very, very good. Very quick. Very creative. But Ender didn’t think like that at all. He was thinking: What does the enemy want and need? How can I give them what they need, in such a way as to leave them vulnerable? How can I take away the enemy’s will or capacity to fight? It’s a different mindset.”

  “So why didn’t you adopt that mindset?” asked Cincinnatus.

  “I didn’t know that’s what Ender was doing. We were close—I was his best friend, and he was my only friend, your mother and I only tolerated each other in those days. But I didn’t realize that he was doing something so profoundly different from what I was doing. I just thought his ideas, his orders came from pure genius. Or sometimes I thought his orders were insane, but it always worked, so afterward I called it brilliance.”

  “Why couldn’t you think the way he did?”

  “Because Ender knew how to love. I’m not talking about warm gooey emotions—though I didn’t have those, either. I’m talking about putting yourself inside someone else and embracing their needs, understanding what they hunger for, and also what will actually be good for them. Understanding them better than they understand themselves. Like a mother who can tell when her child is sleepy even as the child absolutely denies that he’s sleepy at all. He did that with his opponents. He saw them whole and true. And then he helped them discover the truth about themselves—that they weren’t warriors. They didn’t have the talent for it. He revealed to them that war was not their right path. Which was always true. War isn’t the right path. If you love war, you’ll fail at it, compared to someone like Ender who hates it so much that he’ll do anything to win and put an end to it.”

  “You hate war to win it. You love your enemy to destroy him. I don’t like paradoxes, they always feel as though somebody’s trying to trick me.”

  “Usually they’re just tricking themselves. But these aren’t really paradoxes. Someone who thinks he loves war is always wrong, because war destroys everything it touches. It unbuilds things. So when war can’t be avoided, you fight in such a way as to reveal to the enemy how war is destroying him. When he finally sees it, he stops.”

  “Except that what Ender did was kill the enemy. Which works even better.”

  “No,” said the Giant. “He wasn’t aiming to kill. Remember, when he fought the Hive Queens he thought it was all training. He thought he was being tested by Mazer Rackham. So his goal was to expose to his teacher how destructive the testing process was. He fought as if he were fighting the Formics, but he was only ruthless within the simulation.”

  “He killed that boy in Battle School.”

  “He defended himself. Brutally, thoroughly. But murder was not his goal. He just wanted to show Bonzo that the war he insisted on fighting was destructive. He actually loved the boy. He admired his pride, his love of honor. He was trying to save him from his own destructiveness.”

  “I think you were the better commander.”

  “I was quicker than Ender. I was more ruthless.” The Giant sighed. “But in battle after battle, I saw that Ender’s way was the right one. And when I finally came to understand what he was doing, I tried. I just … didn’t have the capacity to love my enemy. I understood Achilles well enough, but I didn’t love him. I only feared him. Until the very end. But I had no choice but to kill him—that’s what I understood. Achilles wasn’t Bonzo. Achilles would never stop because someone showed him how destructive his wars were. Destruction was his point. He loved destruction. He was truly evil.”

  “What would Ender have done with him, then?”

  “What I did. He would have killed him. Or tried. Achilles was smart and quick. He might have beaten Ender.”

  “But he couldn’t beat you.”

  “I don’t know about ‘couldn’t.’ He didn’t beat me.”

  Time after time during the conversation, Cincinnatus wanted to say, Were you afraid? I’m so afraid.

  But he didn’t say it. He talked, he listened, and he went back to the growing terror of preparing for a war he wasn’t competent to fight.

  He began to have nightmares. Vids of the Formics replayed in his mind, always tearing apart Ender or Carlotta or the Giant, as they screamed, “Sergeant! Help me! Save me, Sergeant!” And in the nightmare, he stood there with powerful weapons in his hands and he could not aim them, could not fire, could only stand and watch his family die.

  The three of them bunked together in the upper lab, but when the nightmares began, Cincinnatus began sleeping in the Puppy, or in some other place in the ship, wherever he could curl up and catch a few hours of sleep before the dreams began.

  He checked the weapons again and again, knowing that they worked fine; it was the soldier who was going to misfire.

  So it was that when they began to get visuals from the tiny drones they sent on ahead of the Herodotus, Cincinnatus was already so terrified he could hardly breathe. He could not believe the others didn’t notice. But they didn’t. They kept deferring to him as they discussed possible strategies. And when the visuals began coming back and the sheer size of the monster starship became clear to them, they openly showed their fear—nervous laughter, lame jokes, outright declarations of awe and dread. But Cincinnatus showed them nothing, and they continued to rely on him.

  The odd thing was that even though he was absolutely consumed with his own fear, the analytical part of Cincinnatus’s brain didn’t freeze up at all.

  “I see no sign that the bogey has spotted our drones,” Cincinnatus said. “In fact, I see no sign that they’re doing any kind of recon on the planet, even though they’re in geosynchronous orbit around it.”

  “Maybe they have instruments that don’t have to penetrate the atmosphere,” said Carlotta. “We do, after all.”

  “We can determine the oxygen content and so we know that it’s a plant-dominated world,” said Cincinnatus. “But if we were going to settle there, we’d be sending drones to pick up samples of the biota to determine the chemistry of life to see if it’s compatible with us.”

  The Giant hummed a long low “Ummmmmm” and said, “The Formics didn’t have to do that because when they colonized, they had this gas that broke down all life-forms into a protoplasmic goo. Their strategy was to get rid of the local flora and fauna and replace it with fast-growing flora of their own.”

  “So when the Formics came to Earth, they didn’t probe or test at all?” asked Carlotta.

  “Not as far as we could tell,” said Cincinnatus. “I’ve been going over all that during the past couple of months and the Formics didn’t do any of the things we would have expected. Now we understand why, but at the time we had no idea of their mission.”

  “You say ‘we’ as if you were there,” said Ender.

  “We humans. We military people,” said Cincinnatus. “The way you say ‘we’ about scientists in general.”

  “So are you saying that these aliens are like the Formics?” asked Carlotta.

  “No,” said Cincinnatus.

  “How could they be?” asked Ender, sounding impatient as if Carlotta’s question had been dumb. “Think how different the Formics were from the human race. These aliens are bound to be completely different from either the Formics or us.”

  The Giant spoke again. “That’s not what Cincinnatus meant.”

  Ender and Carlotta looked at Cincinnatus. “Well, what did you mean?”

  Cincinnatus looked at the Giant. “What did you think I meant?”

  “Just say it,” said the Giant. “You don’t need my approval first.”

  But of course that implied that he already had the Giant’s approval.

  “What I think,” said Cincinnatus, “is that this ship isn’t like the Formics. It is the Formics.”

  Carlotta and Ender were so surprised that Ender laughed and Carlotta even let out a single derisive hoot. “The Formics are all dead.”

  Cincinnatus shrugged. It didn’t matter whether they believed him or not. He might be wrong anyway.

  “Help them,” said the Giant.

  “That ship isn’t emitting any kind of radio waves. It has no drones, no probes. The engines only fired enough to get the ship into orbit around the rock. Then nothing. Would that even be possible in a human ship?”

  “We never thought it was human,” said Ender.

  “Whoever is on that ship doesn’t use electromagnetic waves for communication.”

  “So they have ansibles,” said Carlotta.

  “It’s more than that,” said Cincinnatus. “It looks like a Formic ship. Not the ones that came to Earth, but the same aesthetic is at work here.”

  “There’s no aesthetic at all,” said Carlotta.

  “That’s the Formic look. No attempt at grace or proportion. Look at all the openings. Could adult humans use those? They’re low and wide. Perfect for Formic workers to scurry out. Just like the doors in the surface of the Formic colony ships. The colony expedition they sent to Earth was a new model. Smaller and leaner than this one. Also faster. Not as close to lightspeed as the Herodotus, but near enough to get relativistic benefits. But this ship—do you see anything that could possibly cope with relativistic speeds?”

  Carlotta blushed. “I didn’t even think of that. No. The shielding is stone, and no ramscoop. It has to carry enough fuel to accelerate that massive slab of stone and then decelerate it at the end of the journey. This is a slowship.”

  “It’s practically a moon,” said Ender.

  “During their first wave of colonization, the Formics must have sent out ships like this,” said Cincinnatus. “Huge because they had to maintain an ecosystem for decades of flight, not just a few years. Stone shielding to survive collisions with rocks, not radiation. It must have been ships like this that founded their earliest colonies.”

  “So how long has this one been traveling?”

  “At ten percent of lightspeed—they might have enough fuel for that, don’t you think, Carlotta?”

  She shrugged. “Probably.”

  “They might have been going for seven hundred years, maybe even a thousand. Look at how pitted and cratered the shield is. How many collisions does that represent?”

  “That’s a long time to maintain a sealed ecosystem,” said Carlotta.

  “If it really is a Formic ship,” said Cincinnatus, “and it really has been going for seven or eight or ten centuries, anything could have happened. A disease. Running out of unrecoverable trace elements. I think maybe they got to their original destination centuries ago, but it was uninhabitable so they went on, looking for another world. This might be the first one they found.”

  Carlotta shook her head. “When they came to Earth, the Formics went right down to the planet surface and started remaking it. Here they’re doing nothing. I think they’re dead in there.”

  “Then how did it get into geosynchronous orbit? The Formics never developed computers, because they had the brains of all the workers for data storage and processing. They had no automatic systems that we know of. Somebody detected this planet and brought the ship in.”

  “So why are they inert?” asked Ender.

  “Because they saw us,” said Cincinnatus.

  Ender scoffed. “Come on, when they came to Earth our ships were swarming everywhere, from the Kuiper Belt on in!”

  “But to them, our ships were nothing,” said Cincinnatus. “Slow. They had relativistic starships by then and we had never left the solar system. Now, though, what did we just show these aliens? A starship that cuts nearer the speed of light than the Formics ever managed, and there they are in an old, prerelativistic ark. They don’t dare go about their business. They’re waiting to see what we plan to do.”

  The Giant spoke up. “At least we have to assume that’s what they’re doing.”

  Cincinnatus felt a little thrill of triumph. Probably the Giant had worked all this out just as he had—and probably faster. But he had assumed Cincinnatus had it worked out exactly right, and that the others hadn’t.