Ender in Exile (Ender's Saga 1.20)

Your friend, Cham

Ender knew that making him the nominal governor of the colony was a joke. When he got there, the colony would already be a going concern, with its own elected leaders. He would be a thirteen-year-old--well, by then a fifteen-year-old--whose only claim to authority was that forty years before he commanded the grandparents of the colonists, or at least their parents, in a war that was ancient history by then.

They would have bonded together into a closed community, and it would be outrageous for the I.F. to send them any governor at all, let alone a teenager.

But they'd soon find out that if nobody wanted him to govern, Ender would go along quite happily. All he cared about was getting to a formic planet to see what they had left behind.

The bodies that had so recently been dissected would have long since rotted away; but there's no way the colonists could have settled or even explored more than a tiny fraction of the formic civilization's buildings and artifacts. Governing the colony would be an annoyance--all Ender wanted was to see if there was some way to understand the enemy he had loved and vanquished.

Still, he had to go through the motions of preparing to be governor. For instance, training sessions with legal experts who had drafted the constitution that was being imposed on all the colonies. And even though Ender didn't actually care, he could see that an honest effort had been made to reflect what had been reported by all the soldiers-turned-colonists so far. He should have expected that. Anything Graff did, or caused to be done, was done well.

And then there were the even-less-relevant lessons on the workings of starships. What did Ender care? He was never going to be regular fleet. He had no interest in captaining any vessel of any size.

On the third day of his walk-through of the ship that would carry him and his colonists, Ender was so tired of phony nautical terminology transferred to starships that he found himself making sarcastic remarks. Fortunately, he didn't actually say them, he only thought them. Do we swab the decks, matey? Will the bosun pipe us aboard? How many degrees will she tack into the wind, sir?

"You know," said the captain who had Ender duty today, "the real barrier to interstellar flight wasn't just getting up to lightspeed. It was overcoming the collision problem."

"You mean with all of space to work in..." Then, from the captain's smirk, Ender realized he had fallen into a little trap. "Ah. You mean collisions with space debris."

"All those old vids showing spaceships dodging through asteroid clusters--they weren't actually far off. Because when you hit a molecule of hydrogen when you're near lightspeed, it releases a huge amount of energy. Like hitting a huge rock at a much slower speed. Tears you up. Any shielding scheme our ancestors came up with involved so much additional mass, or cost so much energy and therefore fuel, that it simply wasn't practical. You had so much mass that you couldn't carry enough fuel to get anywhere."

"So how did we finally solve it?" asked Ender.

"Well of course we didn't," said the captain.

Again, Ender could see that this was an old prank to play on novices, and so he gave the man the pleasure of showing off his superior knowledge. "Then how are we getting from star to star?" asked Ender. Instead of saying, Ah, so it's formic technology.

"The formics did it for us," said the captain with delight. "When they got here, yes, they devastated parts of China and damn near whupped us in the first two wars. But they also taught us. The very fact that they got here told us that it could be done. And then they thoughtfully left behind dozens of working starships for us to study."

The captain had by now led Ender to the very front of the ship, through several doors that required the highest security clearance to enter. "Not everybody gets to see this, but I was told that you were to see everything."

It was crystalline in substance and ovoid in shape, except that it came to a sharp point at the back. "Please don't tell me it's an egg," said Ender.

The captain chuckled. "Don't tell anybody, but the engines of this ship, and all that fuel--they're just for maneuvering near planets and moons and such. And getting the ship going. Once we get up to one percent of lightspeed, we switch on this baby, and from then on, it's just a matter of controlling the intensity and direction."

"Of what?"

"Of the drive field," said the captain. "It was such an elegant solution, but we hadn't even discovered the area of science that would have gotten us to this."

"And what area is that?"

"Strong force field dynamics," said the captain. "When people speak of it, they almost always say that the strong force field breaks apart molecules, but that's not the real story. What it really does is change the direction of

the strong force. Molecules simply can't hold together when the nuclei of all the constituent atoms start to prefer a particular direction of movement at lightspeed."

Ender knew he was pouring on technical terms, but he was tired of the game. "What you're saying is that the field generated by this device takes all the molecules and objects it runs into in the direction of movement and uses the nuclear strong force to make them move in a uniform direction at lightspeed."

The captain grinned. "Touche. But you're an admiral, sir, and so I was giving you the show I give all the admirals." He winked. "Most of them don't have a clue what I'm saying, and they're too stuffed to admit it and ask me to translate."

"What happens to the energy from the breaking of the molecules into their constituent atoms?" asked Ender.

"That, sir, is what powers the ship. No, I'll be more specific. That's what actually moves the ship. It's so beautiful. We move forward under rockets, and then we switch off the engines--can't be generating molecules of our own!--and turn on the egg--yeah, we call it the egg. The field goes up--it's shaped exactly like the crystal ball here--and the leading edges start colliding with molecules and tearing them up. The atoms are channeled along the field and they all emerge at the trailing point. Giving us an incredible amount of thrust. I've talked to physicists who still don't get it. They say there isn't enough energy stored in the molecular bonds to produce the thrust--they've come up with all kinds of theories about where the extra energy is coming from."

"And we got this from the formics."

"There was one terrible accident the first time we turned on one of these. Of course they weren't using them in-system. But we had one of our cruisers simply disappear because it was docked right up against a formic ship when the egg got turned on. Poof. Every molecule in the cruiser--including the unluckiest crew in history--got incorporated into the field, then got spit out the back, and made the formic ship itself jump like a bullet halfway across the solar system."

"Didn't that kill the people on the formic ship, too? To jump that fast?"