Enders In Exile

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?"
    "No. Because the formic
anti-grav—technically, anti-inertial—was on.
Powered by the egg reaction, too, of course. It's like all the
molecules in space were put there to be cheap fuel for our ships and
everything on them. Anyway, the anti-gravs compensated for the jump and
the only problem was communicating with IFCom to tell them what
happened. Without the cruiser, no communications except short-range
radio."
    The captain went on to
tell about the clever way the men on the formic ship attracted the
attention of rescuers, but Ender's concentration was on something
else—something so disturbing that it made him lightheaded and
a little nauseated from the shock of it.
    The egg, the strong
force field generator, obviously was the source of the molecular
disruption device. What the captain had just described was the reaction
that was in the M.D. Device, the "Little Doctor," which Ender had used
to destroy the formic home planet and kill all the hive queens.
    Ender thought it was a
technology that humans had come up with on their own. But it was
clearly based on formic technology. You just take away the controls
that shape the field, and you've got a field that chews up everything
in its path and spits it out as raw atoms. A field that sustains itself
on the energy it generates by playing with the strong nuclear force. A
planet-eater.
    The formics had to
recognize it when Ender used it the first time. It wasn't mysterious to
them—they'd recognize it immediately as a raw, uncontrolled
weaponization of the principle that powered every formic starship.
    Between the time of
that battle and the final one, the formics surely had the time to do
the same thing—to weaponize the strong force field generator
and use it against the humans before they came in range.
    They absolutely knew
what the weapon was. They could have made their own whenever they
wanted. But they didn't do it. They just sat there waiting for Ender.
    They gave us the
stardrive we used to get to them, and the weapon we used to kill them.
They gave us everything.
    We humans are supposed
to be so clever. So inventive. Yet this was completely beyond our
reach.
We
make desks with clever holodisplays
that we can play really fun games on. Plus send each other letters over
vast distances. But compared to them, we didn't even
know how to
kill
properly. While they knew
how—but chose not to use the technology that way.
    "Well, this part of the
tour usually bores people," said the captain.
    "No, I wasn't bored.
Truly. I was just thinking."
    "About what?"
    "Stuff that's too
classified to talk about using any method but telepathy," said Ender.
Which was true—the existence of the M.D. Device was only on a
need-to-know basis, and the secret had been well kept. Even the men who
deployed and used the weapons didn't understand what they were and what
they could do. The soldiers who had seen the Little Doctor consume a
planet were dead, lost in the same vast chain reaction. The soldiers
who had seen it used in one of the early battles just thought of it as
an incredibly big bomb. Only the top brass understood it—and
Ender, because Mazer Rackham had insisted that he had to be told what
the weapons he carried actually were and how they worked. As Mazer told
him later, "I told Graff, You don't give a man a bag of tools and not
tell him what they are and what they do and how they might go wrong."
    Graff again. Graff who
decided Mazer was right and allowed them to