Enders In Exile

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.
"Touché. 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