If only Bean knew how much time he had. So far he was still managing to keep his body functioning, mostly by doing as little as possible with his hands and legs, just enough stimulation to keep his blood from pooling. Exercise could kill him; but so could indolence. He could not allow himself to die until he was sure that the children would stay.

  He had figured that he could force them, if necessary, by crippling the ship. Now he wasn’t sure that from the cargo hold he could do any damage Carlotta couldn’t repair. So instead of trapping them, he would have to persuade them. And he couldn’t do that without having plans he could lay out for them, plans that made sense and sounded attractive.

  The alien ship changed everything. It represented a potential rival flora and fauna for them to contend with. If there were sentient beings aboard—sleeping colonists in stasis, awaiting arrival?—then it might be impossible for the children to grow up and raise families in safety.

  Bean would not live long enough to find another planet. And if he died before they found a place where they could put down roots, chances were they would return to the Hundred Worlds and the opportunity would be lost. If they survived to adulthood, their genome would be regarded as defective. Chances are they would be forbidden to reproduce; at least that’s how the laws were shaping up on the most civilized worlds.

  Petra was long dead, but that didn’t change Bean’s promise to her. They had agreed that this was the best course for the antonine children. He was not going to change his mind now. But he couldn’t stop the children from doing what they wanted. He could still shape their world to some degree by withholding information from them. But these weren’t ordinary six-year-olds, ready to believe in magic and ghosts if an adult told them such stories. The only information he could be sure of keeping from them was the secret of his own plans and intentions. Yet he still had enough power over the ship, and over them, that his plans and intentions were the most important facts in their environment. Until he died.

  After two days of study, Ender had his report ready, and so did Carlotta and Sergeant. They gathered in the cargo hold for show and tell.

  Ender began it.

  “This is a Formic ship,” he said. “The proteins in the rat-crab are the complete set of Formic-world proteins, with no extras.

  “But here’s the odd thing. The DNA is almost identical to the Formics’ own genome as gathered and recorded from the many corpses after the war. There are key differences, but they’re localized. It’s as if the Formics went for a kind of perverse neoteny—these rat-crabs seem to be a deliberate throwback to an earlier stage in Formic evolution, with these savage claws spliced on, and a hard carapace, which is only vestigial in the adult Formics.”

  Carlotta and Sergeant understood the implications at once. “So the Hive Queens can modify their own offspring,” said Sergeant. “They decided that some of their babies would be those little monsters.”

  “I doubt they thought of them as their children anymore, if they ever did,” said Carlotta. “When you have babies by the thousand, I bet the Hive Queens had no qualms about regarding a few of them as animals.”

  Bean refrained from the obvious comparison; they wouldn’t have appreciated the jest.

  “Any idea how they reproduce?” Carlotta asked Ender.

  “This one was a female,” said Ender. “It seemed fully capable of reproduction, but not on a large scale, and it had no egg developing inside it.” He turned to Sergeant. “Did this one look any different from the others?”

  “It looked closer, mostly,” said Sergeant. “They were moving fast and coming right at me. All I had was a general impression of their size, but they seemed all the same.”

  “So maybe they were all female, like worker Formics,” said Ender. “Or else both sexes were there, and sexual dimorphism is minimal, as in humans. What makes sense is that the Hive Queen doesn’t want these creatures to have dominant queens of their own. So they’re all capable of reproduction.”

  “They reproduce like rats,” said Carlotta.

  “There must be some limiting factor to their population,” said Sergeant. “Or so the Hive Queen that created them intended. It might not have been the Hive Queen of this colony. They might have been developed long before and then reproduced naturally. The Formics might not even have remembered that these rat-crabs began as their kin.”

  “Do you think they’re edible?” asked Carlotta. “Not to us, but…”

  “They’re meaty,” said Ender. “You’re right, this might be dinner on the hoof.”

  “So why give them those claws?” asked Sergeant.

  “One crushing claw,” said Ender. “It could snap any bone in our bodies like a cracker. Against the Giant here, I think they’d have to resort to using the other claw, which seems to be for grasping and tearing. They use the crusher to break things, then hold it while pulling and tearing.”

  “So it’s a flesh-eater,” said Bean.

  “Or it eats a particularly tough kind of fruit or nut,” said Ender. “We can’t know until we see them in their habitat.”

  “Which right now is a huge starship,” said Bean.

  “My turn, then?” asked Carlotta.

  “Are you done, Ender?” asked Bean.

  “With the main stuff. Formic proteins, probably derived from the Formics themselves. Sergeant’s the one who discovered they’re dangerous and strong and quick. And I don’t know how long a pressure suit would hold out against them.”

  “What kills them?” asked Sergeant.

  “Anything. Their carapace doesn’t protect them from anything stronger than teeth of smaller animals. They could crush each other, and they could be mashed by a fist-sized rock. So you tell us what weapons we should use to keep them at bay.”

  Sergeant nodded. “No bullets, not on a ship. I wondered if we could slow them down with a sedative spray.”

  “I’d have to have a living specimen to see what worked on them,” said Ender. “But there are sedatives that have been used on specimens of Formic-world fauna from several of the colony worlds. I could whip up a cocktail of seds that have no effect on humans.”

  “I just don’t want to go in killing them wholesale,” said Sergeant. “Now that we know they’re Formic-derived, it’s not impossible that they’re actually the ones piloting the ship.”

  “Brain’s too small,” said Ender.

  “But they might have queens,” said Sergeant. “Or some kind of collective mind that’s smarter than any individual. I just don’t think we should go in killing. I keep thinking of the old vids of the Formics during the Scouring of China, that vile fog that reduced living creatures to pools and piles of protoplasmic goo.”

  “So let’s have several sedatives ready that can be delivered as a fog,” said Bean. “And a good solid backup plan. An acid spray, for instance. Even if they’re sentient or semisentient, if they come at us to kill us, we hit them first and leave them dead.”

  “Nature red in tooth and claw,” said Carlotta.

  “Don’t get sentimental about creatures that want to kill us,” said Sergeant.

  “I wasn’t sentimental,” said Carlotta. “I approve of us getting our claws red, if that’s what it takes to survive. We’re all the Giant’s children, aren’t we? Not bloodthirsty, but not timid about killing when we have to. Not like that namby-pam that Ender was named for.”

  “You’re talking about my friend,” said Bean.

  “Not ours,” said Carlotta.

  “If it came to that,” said Bean, “you would have no truer friend or stronger protector. But you’ll never know because you’ll never meet.”

  “You say that as if he were still alive,” said Ender.

  “Why do you assume he isn’t?” asked Bean.

  “Because it’s been more than four centuries since the war.”

  “We’re not the only ones who know how to use starflight to avoid aging at the same rate as the human race.”

  “But we’re insane,” said Sergeant. “Nobody in their right mind would do this.”

  “We’re a new species struggling to survive,” said Ender. “Why would the great Ender Wiggin become a wanderer?”

  Bean didn’t want to take the conversation any farther down that road. He’d had his suspicions ever since he read The Hive Queen, but he didn’t want to put them into words, not while they were this close to an ancient Formic colony ship. “Carlotta?” he said. “What do we know about their ship?”

  “It’s definitely older tech. And it’s Formic technology—no writing, but some major color coding. Lots of little motors, which is why they need to have all these maintenance hatches. Of course they had to eliminate a lot of doorage in later ships when they got up to relativistic speeds. This design wouldn’t do at all.

  “I think they build the ship in space by attaching everything to an asteroid they sculpted into the shape we’re seeing. Probably most of the metal in the ship’s frame and hull came from the iron and nickel and such in the rest of the asteroid. But it’s not the impermeable alloy they used in the ships that invaded Earth back in the 2100s.”

  “They didn’t need it yet,” said Sergeant. “At only ten percent lightspeed.”

  “Right,” said Carlotta. “I think this ship settles the argument.” She was referring to a long-standing dispute among historians about the incredibly tough alloy that formed the shell around all the ships that the International Fleet fought against in the Formic Wars. Was the alloy developed as a defense against enemy attacks? That would imply that either Formics fought each other in space, or they had faced other species of aliens that humans had not yet encountered—or they came to Earth intending to go into combat against humans.

  On the other hand, if the tougher-than-diamond shell was intended only to shield against radiation while traveling at near-lightspeed, it would suggest that the Formics had not come to Earth prepared for war; the impenetrability of their armor was simply coincidence.

  This ark showed that Formics sent out their colony ships with no defenses against attack, only a primitive collision shielding at the front. The Formics turned out to be devastatingly formidable in war, but war was almost certainly not their intention when they came to Earth.

  “Nice to know,” said Bean. “Fortunately, the argument never mattered anyway. What else?”

  “The huge pillars are structural—the whole strength of the ship is vertical rising out of the rock, like a huge skyscraper. But they’re also hollow. Rocket engines, and they carry fuel. Not radioactive, lots of carbon traces. It must be a very efficient fuel because even if the rock contains huge fuel reservoirs, it’s not as if they can ever take this thing down to a planetary surface to process whatever carbon-based fuel source they use.”

  “They don’t need much fuel,” said Bean. “It’s a generation ship, so they don’t have to accelerate much. Very slow burn until they reach cruising speed, and then nothing until deceleration.”

  “No way to guess how much fuel they have left. This planet might be their last hope, or just a casual visit to see if it might do. The machinery I looked at was aging but it works fine.”

  “Aging like a thousand years?” asked Bean.

  “No. More like a hundred years. I think everything’s been replaced again and again during the voyage. Plenty of indications that there’s been a lot of servicing over the years. But none recently.”

  “Any firm dates?”

  “Just estimates of wear and tear. There are structural pieces that have never been replaced, with pry marks and scrapes from multiple removals and reinstallments of the working parts. Lots of lubrication residue, but nothing recent.”

  “So we’re looking at some kind of disaster that hit the ship maybe a century ago,” said Sergeant. “Something that left the rat-crabs in charge.”

  “No maintenance,” said Carlotta, “but there’s still a pilot who understands how to put a ship into geosync.”

  “Anything else? Besides the pillars.”

  “I’ve been saving the best part. The huge barrel-shaped structure surrounded by the pillars is actually the housing of a giant rotating cylinder inside.”

  “So instead of spinning the whole ship, they spin a drum inside it? That’s just crazy,” said Ender.

  “That’s what I thought,” said Carlotta. “But the Formics don’t necessarily respond to weightlessness the way we do. Their skeletons are cartilaginous, not bony, so they can be replenished in a way our bones can’t. I don’t think the Formics spin the cylinder to create centrifugal gravity for themselves—it’s for their life support.”

  “Plants,” said Sergeant.

  “In a space that size they could have trees. Really tall ones,” said Ender.

  “A rain forest,” said Carlotta. “Or even multiple zones, so they can maintain a full range of useful bioforms. Food crops constantly reseeded. Maybe the rat-crabs are part of the harvesting system. A full-fledged ecotat—habitat for the entire biota to establish Formic life on the new world.”

  “Maybe their most invasive species,” said Ender. “To get quick coverage.”

  “And of course it’s generating oxygen for the ship in transit,” said Carlotta.

  “So what we do with our racks of trays under UV light, they’re doing with a huge spinning drum.”

  “But the rest of the ship has no spin at all,” said Carlotta. “We opened one maintenance door at a place where I could wriggle down and see the cylinder moving past. My estimate is that the spin would give them about three-fourths of a gee on the inner surface of the cylinder.”

  “Is that enough to overcome the pressure of acceleration?” asked Bean.

  “Depends on how gradual the acceleration and deceleration are,” said Carlotta. “And maybe they increase the spin during speed changes.”

  “I’m just thinking that it would save them having to move all the soil to the base of the cylinder whenever they accelerate,” said Bean.

  “But all the other rooms in the place would either have no gravity or their ‘down’ would be away from the mass of rock, in the direction of the rockets,” said Carlotta.

  “And the corridors,” said Sergeant. “The Formics must have moved through them on all sixes. Because short as we are, I couldn’t stand upright in their tunnels. An adult-size human would be on his belly and it would be hard to use a weapon.”

  “That’s how the tunnels were on Eros,” said Bean. “The Formics like their ceilings low.”

  “Well, it makes sense in weightless spaces,” said Carlotta. “They’re never out of reach of a wall or ceiling.”

  “But because the corridors are weightless,” said Sergeant, “we can walk in them the other way. The tunnels are wide enough for two Formics to pass, so people as short as us can stand on the walls and be fully upright. We only have to jump over the entrances to the side tunnels.”

  “Can you jump with magnetics?” asked Bean.

  “We’ll set them as low as we can. We don’t need to cling the way we do on the surface of a ship out in cold space. Just enough to keep our feet reaching for the floor.”

  “Good work, all of you,” said Bean. “I know there’s a lot more in your reports, and I’ve scanned your data as you collected it. I think we have all the useful information we’re going to get from the outside, and from that lump of rab that Sergeant brought back.”

  “Rab,” said Sergeant, giggling a little. “Rat-crab.”

  “Half a rabbit,” said Carlotta.

  “‘Rab’ it is,” said Ender. “Until they tell us what they call themselves.”

  “Now, when you go inside,” said Bean, “you have to remember that Formic-based life-forms probably all have some degree of mental communication. Even if it’s just a sharing of impulses and desires and warnings, they can tell each other what they need to know. So if any of the rabs notices you, they all know you’re there. They might be smart enough to set ambushes. You have to be alert. And if it gets dangerous, get out. You are not replaceable. Do you understand me?”

  Sergeant nodded, Carlotta gulped, and Ender looked bored.

  “Ender,” said Bean, “it looks to me as if you think you’re not going in with the others.”

  That woke him up. “Me?”

  “Three,” said Bean. “I’d go myself, but you know my limitations.”

  “But I’m the biology guy,” said Ender.

  “Precisely why you need to go,” said Bean. “Three for defense is the minimum anyway, but if you’re there, you can learn things on the spot instead of waiting for them to bring things back for you to study.”

  “But I’m—I’m not trained for—”

  Sergeant looked at him with contempt. “You think you’re above getting your hands dirty.”

  “I was up to my elbows in rat-crab blood,” said Ender.

  “He didn’t mean literally ‘dirty,’” said Carlotta. “You think we’re expendable and you’re the irreplaceable one.”

  “Nobody’s expendable,” said Ender. “I just won’t be much help.”

  “You beat me,” said Sergeant dryly. “Don’t pretend you’re helpless.”

  “He’s scared,” said Bean. “That’s all.”

  “I’m not a coward,” said Ender coldly.

  “We’re all scared,” said Carlotta.

  “Terrified,” said Sergeant. “When those rab bastards came at me I pooped my pressure suit. Nobody in his right mind isn’t scared going into unknown territory facing fast-moving enemies and more potential enemies that you don’t even know about.”

  “So why are we doing it?” asked Ender. “The ship is dead, it’s not going to follow our trail back to Earth. The human race isn’t in danger. Let’s just make our report and move on.”

  That was what Bean most dreaded—the perfectly sensible idea of getting out of there. But, knowing his children, he couldn’t argue in favor of the course he wanted.

  “Ender’s right,” said Bean. “We don’t have to investigate anything more about this ship.”