Ender in Exile (Ender's Saga 1.20)

Ender sat up immediately, instantly aware of his surroundings. Even though he had never knowingly been in combat, he had acquired the military habit of remaining alert even when asleep. By the time the ensign whose duty was to waken him arrived, Ender was already standing up and smiling. "I understand it's time for my meeting with Admiral Morgan."

"Yes sir, if you please sir." The poor kid (well, six or seven years older than Ender, but still young to have an admiral yelling at him all day) was all over himself with eagerness to please Ender. So Ender made it a point to be visibly pleased. "He's in a temper," the ensign whispered.

"Let's see if I can cheer him up a little," said Ender.

"Not bloody likely," whispered the ensign. Then he had the door open. "Admiral Andrew Wiggin, sir." Ender stepped in as he was announced; the ensign beat a hasty retreat and shut the door behind him.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" demanded Admiral Morgan, his face livid. Since Ender had been napping for two hours, that meant either that Morgan had maintained his lividity throughout the interim, or he was able to switch it on at will, for effect. Ender was betting on the latter.

"I'm meeting with the captain of the ship, at his request."

"Sir," said Admiral Morgan.

"Oh, you don't need to call me sir," said Ender. "Andrew will do. I don't like to insist on the privileges of rank." Ender sat down in a comfortable chair beside Morgan's desk, instead of the stiff chair directly in front of it.

"On my ship you have no rank," said Morgan.

"I have no authority," said Ender. "But my rank travels with me."

"You are fomenting rebellion on my ship, coopting vital resources, subverting a mission whose primary purpose is to deliver you to the colony that you purport to be ready to govern."

"Rebellion? We're reading Taming of the Shrew, not Richard II."

"I'm still talking, boy! You may think you're heroism personified because you and your little chums played a videogame that turned out to be real, but I won't put up with this kind of subversion on my own ship! Whatever you did that made you famous and got you that ridiculous rank is over. You're in the real world now, and you're just a snot-nosed boy with delusions of grandeur."

Ender sat in silence, regarding him calmly.

"Now you can answer."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," said Ender.

Whereupon Morgan let fly with such a string of obscenities and vulgarities that it sounded like he had collected the favorite sayings of the entire fleet. If he had been red-faced before, he was purple now. And through it all, Ender struggled to figure out what it was about a play reading that had the man so insanely angry.

When Morgan paused for breath, leaning--no, slumping--on the desk, Ender rose to his feet. "I think you had better prepare the charges for my court martial, Admiral Morgan."

"Court martial! I'm not going to court-martial you, boy! I don't have to! I can have you put in stasis for the duration of the voyage on the authority of my signature alone!"

"Not a person of admiralty rank, I'm afraid," said Ender. "And it seems that formal charges in a court martial are the only way I'm going to get a coherent statement from you about what I have supposedly done to offend your dignity and cause such alarm."

"Oh, you want a formal statement? How about this: Hijacking all ansible communications for three hours so that we are effectively cut off from the rest of the known universe, how about that? Three hours means more than two days back in real time--for all I know there's been a revolution, or my orders have changed, or any number of things might be happening and I can't even send a message to inquire!"

"That's a problem, certainly," said Ender. "But why would you think I have anything to do with it?"

"Because it's got your name all over it," said Morgan. "The message is addressed to you. And it's still coming in, coopting our entire ansible bandwidth."

"Doesn't it occur to you," said Ender gently, "that the message is to me, not from me?"

"From Wiggin, to Wiggin, eyes only, so deeply encrypted that none of the shipboard computers can crack it."

"You tried to crack a secure communication addressed to a ranking officer, without first asking the permission of that officer?"

"It's a subversive communication, boy, that's why I tried to crack it!"

"You know it's subversive because you can't crack it, and you tried to crack it because you know it's subversive," said Ender. He kept his voice soft and cheerful. Not because he knew that it would drive Morgan crazy that Ender remained unflappable--that was just a bonus. He simply assumed that the entire exchange was being recorded to be used as evidence later, and Ender was not going to say a word or reveal an emotion that would not redound to his credit in some later court proceeding. So Morgan could be as abusive as he pleased--Ender was not going to make a single statement that could be excerpted and used to make him look subversive or angry.

"I don't have to justify my actions to you," said Morgan. "I brought you here and canceled your supposed play reading so that you could open the transmission in front of me."

"Eyes only, secure communication--I'm not sure it's proper for you to insist on watching."