Ender's Shadow (The Shadow 1)

"Predilections. Major Anderson."

"It will all be in my report."

"Try to write the entire thing without using the word predilection once."

"Yes, sir."

"I've assigned the destroyer Condor to take the group."

"How many do you want, sir?"

"We have need of a maximum of eleven at any one time. We have Carby, Bee, and Momoe on their way to Tactical already, but Graff tells me that of those three, only Carby is likely to work well with Wiggin. We do need to hold a slot for Ender, but it wouldn't hurt to have a spare. So send ten."

"Which ten?"

"How the hell should I know? Well . . . Bean, him for sure. And the nine others that you think would work best with either Bean or Ender in command, whichever one it turns out to be."

"One list for both possible commanders?"

"With Ender as the first choice. We want them all to train together. Become a team."

The orders came at 1700. Bean was supposed to board the Condor at 1800. It's not as if he had anything to pack. An hour was more time than they gave Ender. So Bean went and told his army what was happening, where he was going.

"We've only had five games," said Itu.

"Got to catch the bus when it comes to the stop, neh?" said Bean.

"Eh," said Itu.

"Who else?" asked Ambul.

"They didn't tell me. Just . . . Tactical School."

"We don't even know where it is."

"Somewhere in space," said Itu.

"No, really?" It was lame, but they laughed. It wasn't all that hard a good-bye. He'd only been with Rabbit for eight days.

"Sorry we didn't win any for you," said Itu.

"We would have won, if I'd wanted to," said Bean.

They looked at him like he was crazy.

"I was the one who proposed that we get rid of the standings, stop caring who wins. How would it look if we do that and I win every time?"

"It would look like you really did care about the standings," said Itu.

"That's not what bothers me," said another toon leader. "Are you telling me you set us up to lose?"

"No, I'm telling you I had a different priority. What do we learn from beating each other? Nothing. We're never going to have to fight human children. We're going to have to fight Buggers. So what do we need to learn? How to coordinate our attacks. How to respond to each other. How to feel the course of the battle, and take responsibility for the whole thing even if you don't have command. That's what I was working on with you guys. And if we won, if we went in and mopped up the walls with them, using my strategy, what does that teach you? You already worked with a good commander. What you needed to do was work with each other. So I put you in tough situations and by the end you were finding ways to bail each other out. To make it work."

"We never made it work well enough to win."

"That's not how I measured it. You made it work. When the Buggers come again, they're going to make things go wrong. Besides the normal friction of war, they're going to be doing stuff we couldn't think of because they're not human, they don't think like us. So plans of attack, what good are they then? We try, we do what we can, but what really counts is what you do when command breaks down. When it's just you with your squadron, and you with your transport, and you with your beat-up strike force that's got only five weapons among eight ships. How do you help each other? How do you make do? That's what I was working on. And then I went back to the officers' mess and told them what I learned. What you guys showed me. I learned stuff from them, too. I told you all the stuff I learned from them, right?"

"Well, you could have told us what you were learning from us," said Itu. They were all still a bit resentful.