"Mazer is Ender's teacher now," Bean mused. "And you're left with me. The kid you didn't want."
Graff blushed again. "That's right," he said. "Since you seem to know everything. I didn't want you."
Even though Bean already knew it, the words still hurt.
"But Bean," said Graff, "the thing is, I was wrong." He put a hand on Bean's shoulder and left the room.
Bean logged on. He was the last of the squadron leaders to do so.
"Are you there?" asked Ender over the headsets.
"All of us," said Bean. "Kind of late for practice this morning, aren't you?"
"Sorry," said Ender. "I overslept."
They laughed. Except Bean.
Ender took them through some maneuvers, warming up for the battle. And then it was time. The display cleared.
Bean waited, anxiety gnawing at his gut.
The enemy appeared in the display.
Their fleet was deployed around a planet that loomed in the center of the display. There had been battles near planets before, but every other time, the world was near the edge of the display - the enemy fleet always tried to lure them away from the planet.
This time there was no luring. Just the most incredible swarm of enemy ships imaginable. Always staying a certain distance away from each other, thousands and thousands of ships followed random, unpredictable, intertwining paths, together forming a cloud of death around the planet.
This is the home planet, thought Bean. He almost said it aloud, but caught himself in time. This is a simulation of the Bugger defense of their home planet.
They've had generations to prepare for us to come. All the previous battles were nothing. These Formics can lose any number of individual Buggers and they don't care. All that matters is the queen. Like the one Mazer Rackham killed in the Second Invasion. And they haven't put a queen at risk in any of these battles. Until now.
That's why they're swarming. There's a queen here.
Where?
On the planet surface, thought Bean. The idea is to keep us from getting to the planet surface.
So that's precisely where we need to go. Dr. Device needs mass. Planets have mass. Pretty simple.
Except that there was no way to get this small force of human ships through that swarm and near enough to the planet to deploy Dr. Device. For if there was anything that history taught, it was this: Sometimes the other side is irresistibly strong, and then the only sensible course of action is to retreat in order to save your force to fight another day.
In this war, however, there would be no other day. There was no hope of retreat. The decisions that lost this battle, and therefore this war, were made two generations ago when these ships were launched, an inadequate force from the start. The commanders who set this fleet in motion may not even have known, then, that this was the Buggers' home world. It was no one's fault. They simply didn't have enough of a force even to make a dent in the enemy's defenses. It didn't matter how brilliant Ender was. When you have only one guy with a shovel, you can't build a dike to hold back the sea.
No retreat, no possibility of victory, no room for delay or maneuver, no reason for the enemy to do anything but continue to do what they were doing.
There were only twenty starships in the human fleet, each with four fighters. And they were the oldest design, sluggish compared to some of the fighters they'd had in earlier battles. It made sense - the Bugger home world was probably the farthest away, so the fleet that got there now had left before any of the other fleets. Before the better ships came on line.
Eighty fighters. Against five thousand, maybe ten thousand enemy ships. It was impossible to determine the number. Bean saw how the display kept losing track of individual enemy ships, how the total count kept fluctuating. There were so many it was overloading the system. They kept winking in and out like fireflies.
A long time passed - many seconds, perhaps a minute. By now Ender usually had them all deployed, ready to move. But still there was nothing from him but silence.
A light blinked on Bean's console. He knew what it meant. All he had to do was press a button, and control of the battle would be his. They were offering it to him, because they thought that Ender had frozen up.
He hasn't frozen up, thought Bean. He hasn't panicked. He