There were only two places where the same character was apparently doubled, one in each line. That might just be the result of one word ending with the same letter that began another, but Bean doubted it. Nothing would be left to chance in this message. So he wrote a little program that would take the doubled letters in one word and, beginning with “aa,” show him what the surrounding letters might be to see if anything looked plausible to him. And he started with the doubled letters in the shorter line, because that pair was surrounded by another pair, in a 1221 pattern.

  The obvious failures, like “xddx” and “pffp,” took no time, but he had to investigate all the variants on “abba” and “adda” and “deed” and “effe” to see what they did to the message. Some were promising and he saved them for later exploration.

  “Why is it in Greek now?” asked Carlotta.

  She was looking over his shoulder again. He hadn’t heard her get up and come over behind him.

  “I converted the original message to Greek characters so that I wouldn’t get distracted by trying to read meanings into letters I hadn’t decoded yet. The ones I’m actually working on are in Roman letters.”

  At that moment, his program showed the letters “iggi.”

  “Piggies,” said Sister Carlotta.

  “Maybe, but it doesn’t flag anything for me.” He started cycling through the dictionary matches with “iggi,” but none of them did any better than “piggies” had.

  “Does it have to be a word?” said Carlotta.

  “Well, if it’s a number, then this is a dead end,” said Bean.

  “No, I mean, why not a name?”

  Bean saw it at once. “How blind can I be.” He plugged the letters w and n to the positions before and after “iggi” and then spread the results through the whole message, making the program show hyphens for the undeciphered letters. The two lines now read

  ---n-------g---n---n---n---i---n---g

  --n-n-wiggin--

  “That doesn’t look right for Common,” said Carlotta. “There should be a lot more i’s than that.”

  “I’m assuming that the message deliberately leaves out letters as much as possible, especially vowels, so it won’t look like Common.”

  “So how will you know when you’ve decoded it?”

  “When it makes sense.”

  “It’s bedtime. I know, you’re not sleeping till you’ve solved it.” He barely noticed that she moved away from behind him. He was busy trying the other doubled letter. This time he had a more complicated job, because the letters before and after the double pair were different. It meant far more combinations to try, and being able to eliminate g, i, n, and w didn’t speed up the process all that much.

  Again, there were quite a few readings that he saved—more than before—but nothing rang a bell until he got to “jees.” The word that Ender’s companions in the final battle used for themselves. “Jeesh.” Could it be? It was definitely a word that might be used as a flag.

  h--n--jeesh-g--en--s-ns--n---si---n---s--g

  -n-n-wiggin---

  If those twenty-seven letters were right, then he had only thirty left to solve. He rubbed his eyes, sighed, and set to work.

  It was noon when the smell of oranges woke him. Sister Carlotta was peeling a mexerica orange. “People are eating these things on the street and spitting the pulp on the sidewalk. You can’t chew it up enough to swallow it. But the juice is the best orange you’ll ever taste in your life.”

  Bean got out of bed and took the segment she offered him. She was right. She handed him a bowl to spit the pulp into. “Good breakfast,” said Bean.

  “Lunch,” she said. She held up a paper. “I take it you consider this to be a solution?”

  It was what he had printed out before going to bed.

  hlpndrjeeshtgdrenrusbnstun6rmysiz40ntrysbtg

  bnfndwigginptr

  “Oh,” said Bean. “I didn’t print out the one with the word breaks.” Putting another mexerica segment in his mouth, Bean padded on bare feet to the computer, called up the right file, and printed it. He brought it back, handed it to Carlotta, spat out pulp, and took his own mexerica from her shopping bag and began peeling.

  “Bean,” she said. “I’m a normal mortal. I get ‘help’ and is this ‘Ender’?”

  Bean took the paper from her.

  hlp ndr jeesh tgdr en rus bns tun 6 rmy siz 40

  n try sbtg

  bn fnd wiggin ptr

  “The vowels are left out as much as possible, and there are other misspellings. But what the first line says is, ‘Help. Ender’s jeesh is together in Russia—’ ”

  “T-g-d-r is ‘together’? And ‘in’ is spelled like French?”

  “Exactly,” said Bean. “I understood it and it doesn’t look like Common.” He went on interpreting. “The next part was confusing for a long time, until I realized that the 6 and the 40 were numbers. I got almost all the other letters before I realized that. The thing is, the numbers matter, but there’s no way to guess them from context. So the next few words are designed to give a context to the numbers. It says ‘Bean’s toon was 6’—that’s because Ender divided Dragon Army into five toons instead of the normal four, but then he gave me a sort of ad hoc toon, and if you added it to the count, it was number six. Only who would know that except for somebody from Battle School? So only somebody like me would get the number. Same thing with the next one. ‘Army size 40.’ Everyone in Battle School knew that there were forty soldiers in every army. Unless you counted the commander, in which case it was forty-one, but see, it doesn’t matter, because that digit is trivial.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because the next letter is n. For ‘north.’ The message is telling their location. They know they’re in Russia. And because they can apparently see the sun or at least shadows on the wall, and they know the date, they can calculate their latitude, more or less. Six-four-zero north. Sixty-four north.”

  “Unless it means something else.”

  “No, the message is meant to be obvious.”

  “To you.”

  “Yes, to me. The rest of that line is ‘try sabotage.’ I think that means that they’re trying to screw up whatever the Russians are trying to make them do. So they’re pretending to go along but really gumming up the works. Very smart to get that on record. The fact that Graff was court-martialed after winning the Formic War suggests that they’d better get it on record that they were not collaborating with the enemy—in case the other side wins.”

  “But Russia isn’t at war with anybody.”

  “The Polemarch was Russian, and Warsaw Pact troops were at the heart of his side in the League War. You’ve got to remember, Russia was the country that was most on the make before the Formics came and started tearing up real estate and forced humanity to unite under the Hegemon and create the International Fleet. They have always felt cheated out of their destiny, and now that the Formics are gone, it makes sense that they’d be eager to get back on the fast track. They don’t think of themselves as bad guys, they think of themselves as the only people with the will and the resources to unite the world for real, permanently. They think they’re doing a good thing.”

  “People always do.”

  “Not always. But yes, to wage war you have to be able to sell your own people on the idea that either you’re fighting in self-defense, or you’re fighting because you deserve to win, or you’re fighting in order to save other people. The Russian people respond to an altruistic sales pitch as easily as anybody else.”

  “So what about the second line?”

  “‘Bean find Wiggin Peter.’ They’re suggesting that I look for Ender’s older brother. He didn’t go off on the colony ship with Ender and Valentine. And he’s been a player, under the net identity of Locke. And I suppose he’s running Demosthenes, too, now that Valentine is gone.”

  “You knew about that?”

  “I knew a lot of things,” said Bean. “But the main thing is that they’re right. Achilles is hunting for me and he’s hunting for you, and he’s got all the rest of Ender’s jeesh, but he doesn’t even know Ender’s brother exists and he wouldn’t care if he did. But you know and I know that Peter Wiggin would have been in Battle School except for a little character flaw. And for all we know, that character flaw may be exactly what he needs to be a good match against Achilles.”

  “Or it may be exactly the flaw that makes it so a victory for Peter is no better than a victory for Achilles, in terms of the amount of suffering in the world.”

  “Well, we won’t know until we find him, will we?” said Bean.

  “To find him, Bean, you’d have to reveal who you are.”

  “Yes,” said Bean. “Isn’t this exciting?” He did an exaggerated wriggle like a little kid being taken to the zoo.

  “This is your life you’re playing with.”

  “You’re the one who wanted me to find a cause.”

  “Peter Wiggin isn’t a cause, he’s dangerous. You haven’t heard what Graff had to say about him.”

  “On the contrary,” said Bean. “How do you think I learned about him?”

  “But he might be no better than Achilles!”

  “I know of several ways already that he’s better than Achilles. First, he’s not trying to kill us. Second, he’s already got a huge network of contacts with people all over the world, some of whom know he’s as young as he is but most of whom have no idea. Third, he’s ambitious just like Achilles is, only Achilles has already assembled almost all of the children who were tagged as the most brilliant military commanders in the world, while Peter Wiggin will have only one. Me. Do you think he’s dumb enough not to use me?”

  “Use you. That’s the operative word here, Bean.”

  “Well, aren’t you being used in your cause?”

  “By God, not by Peter Wiggin.”

  “I’ll bet Peter Wiggin sends a lot clearer messages than God does,” said Bean. “And if I don’t like what he’s doing, I can always quit.”

  “With someone like Peter, you can’t always quit.”

  “He can’t make me think of what I don’t want to think about. Unless he’s a remarkably stupid genius, he’ll know that.”

  “I wonder if Achilles knows that, as he’s trying to squeeze brilliance out of the other children.”

  “Exactly. Between Peter Wiggin and Achilles, what are the odds that Wiggin could be worse?”

  “Oh, it’s hard to imagine how that could be.”

  “So let’s start thinking of a way to contact Locke without giving away our identity and our location.”

  “I’m going to need more mexerica oranges before we leave Brasil,” said Carlotta.

  Only then did he notice that the two of them had already blown through the whole bagful. “Me too,” he said.

  As she left, the empty bag in hand, she paused at the door. “You did very well with that message, Julian Delphiki.”

  “Thanks, Grandma Carlotta.”

  She left smiling.

  Bean held up the message and scanned it again. The only part of the message that he hadn’t fully interpreted for her was the last word. He didn’t think “ptr” meant Peter. That would have been redundant. “Wiggin” was enough to identify him. No, the “ptr” at the end was a signature. This message was from Petra. She could have tried to write directly to Peter Wiggin. But she had written to Bean, coding it in a way that Peter would never have understood.

  She’s relying on me.

  Bean knew how the others in Ender’s jeesh had resented him. Not a lot, but a little. When they were all in Command School on Eros, before Ender arrived, the military had made Bean the acting commander in all their test battles, even though he was the youngest of them all, even younger than Ender. He knew he’d done a good job, and won their respect. But they never liked taking orders from him and were undisguisedly happy when Ender arrived and Bean was dropped back to be one of them. Nobody ever said, “Good job, Bean,” or “Hey, you did OK.” Except Petra.

  She had done for him on Eros the same thing that Nikolai had done for him in Battle School—provided him with a kind word now and then. He was sure that neither Nikolai nor Petra ever realized how important their casual generosity had been to him. But he remembered that when he needed a friend, the two of them had been there for him. Nikolai had turned out, by the workings of not-entirely-coincidental fate, to be his brother. Did that make Petra his sister?

  It was Petra who reached out to him now. She trusted him to recognize the message, decode it, and act on it.

  There were files in the Battle School record system that said that Bean was not human, and he knew that Graff at least sometimes felt that way because he had overheard those words from his own lips. He knew that Carlotta loved him but she loved Jesus more and anyway, she was old and thought of him as a child. He could rely on her, but she did not rely on him.

  In his Earthside life before Battle School, the only friend Bean had ever had was a girl named Poke, and Achilles had murdered her long before. Murdered her only moments after Bean left her, and moments before he realized his mistake and rushed back to warn her and instead found her body floating in the Rhine. She died trying to save Bean, and she died because Bean couldn’t be relied upon to take as much care to save her.

  Petra’s message meant that maybe he had another friend who needed him after all. And this time, he would not turn his back. This time it was his turn to save his friend, or die trying. How’s that for a cause, Sister Carlotta?

  7

  GOING PUBLIC

  To: Demosthenes%Tecumseh@freeamerica.org, Locke%erasmus@polnet.gov

  From: dontbother@firewall.set

  Re: Achilles heel

  Dear Peter Wiggin,

  A message smuggled to me from the kidnapped children confirms they are (or were, at the time of sending) together, in Russia near the sixty-fourth parallel, doing their best to sabotage those trying to exploit their military talents. Since they will doubtless be separated and moved frequently, the exact location is unimportant, and I am quite sure you already knew Russia was the only country with both the ambition and the means to acquire all the members of Ender’s jeesh.

  I’m sure you recognize the impossibility of releasing these children through military intervention—at the slightest sign of a plausible effort to extract them, they will be killed in order to deprive an enemy of such assets. But it might be possible to persuade either the Russian government or some if not all of those holding the individual children that releasing them is in Russia’s best interest. This might be accomplished by exposing the individual who is almost certainly behind this audacious action, and your two identities are uniquely situated to accuse him in a way that will be taken seriously.

  Therefore I suggest that you do a bit of research into a break-in at a high-security institution for the criminally insane in Belgium during the League War. Three guards were killed and the inmates were released. All but one were recaptured quickly. The one who got away was once a student at Battle School. He is behind the kidnapping. When it is revealed that this psychopath has control of these children, it will cause grave misgivings inside the Russian command system. It will also give them a scapegoat if they decide to return the children.

  Don’t bother trying to trace this email identity. It already never existed. If you can’t figure out who I am and how to contact me from the research you’re about to do, then we don’t have much to talk about anyway.

  Peter’s heart sank when he opened the letter to Demosthenes and saw that it had also been sent to Locke. The salutation “Dear Peter Wiggin” only confirmed it—someone besides the office of the Polemarch had broken his identities. He expected the worst—some kind of blackmail or a demand that he support this or that cause.

  To his surprise, the message was nothing of the kind. It came from someone who claimed to have received a message from the kidnapped kids—and gave him a tantalizing path to follow. Of course he immediately searched the news archives and found the break-in at a high-security mental hospital near Genk. Finding the name of the inmate who got away was much harder, requiring that, as Demosthenes, he ask for help from a law enforcement contact in Germany, and then, as Locke, for additional help from a friend in the Anti-Sabotage Committee in the Office of the Hegemon.

  It yielded a name that made Peter laugh, since it was in the subject line of the email that prompted this search. Achilles, pronounced “ah-SHEEL” in the French manner. An orphan rescued from the streets of Rotterdam by, of all things, a Catholic nun working for the procurement section of the Battle School. He was given surgery to correct a crippled leg, then taken up to Battle School, where he lasted only a few days before being exposed as a serial killer by some of the other students, though in fact he had not killed anyone in the Battle School.

  The list of his victims was interesting. He had a pattern of killing anyone who had ever made him feel or seem helpless or vulnerable. Including the doctor who had repaired his leg. Apparently he wasn’t much for gratitude.

  Putting together the information, Peter could see that his unknown correspondent was right. If in fact this sicko was running the operation that was using these kids for military planning, it was almost certain that the Russian officers working with him did not know his criminal record. Whatever agency liberated Achilles from the mental hospital would not have shared that information with the military who were expected to work with him. There would be outrage that would be heard at the highest levels of the Russian government.