First meetings in the Enderverse

holding on to the door handle, his face contorted with pain. He seemed disabled, but Ender didn’t trust him. He waited warily. And yet in spite of his suspicion he was caught off guard by Mazer’s speed. In a moment he found himself on the floor near the opposite wall, his nose and lip bleeding where his face had hit the bed. He was able to turn enough to see Mazer open the door and leave. The old man was limping and walking slowly.
    Ender smiled in spite of the pain, then rolled over onto his back and laughed until his mouth filled with blood and he started to gag. Then he got up and painfully made his way to the bed. He lay down and in a few minutes a medic came and took care of his injuries.
    As the drug had its effect and Ender drifted off to sleep he remembered the way Mazer limped out of his room and laughed again. He was still laughing softly as his mind went blank and the medic pulled the blanket over him and snapped off the light. He slept until pain woke him in the morning. He dreamed of defeating Mazer.

    The next day Ender went to the simulator room with his nose bandaged and his lip still puffy. Mazer was not there. Instead, a captain who had worked with him before showed him an addition that had been made. The captain pointed to a tube with a loop at one end. “Radio. Primitive, I know, but it loops over your ear and we tuck the other end into your mouth like this.”
    “Watch it,” Ender said as the captain pushed the end of the tube into his swollen lip.
    “Sorry. Now you just talk.”
    “Good. Who to?”
    The captain smiled. “Ask and see.”
    Ender shrugged and turned to the simulator. As he did a voice reverberated through his skull. It was too loud for him to understand, and he ripped the radio off his ear.
    “What are you trying to do, make me deaf?”
    The captain shook his head and turned a dial on a small box on a nearby table. Ender put the radio back on.
    “Commander,” the radio said in a familiar voice.
    Ender answered, “Yes.”
    “Instructions, sir?”
    The voice was definitely familiar. “Bean?” Ender asked.
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Bean, this is Ender.”
    Silence. And then a burst of laughter from the other side. Then six or seven more voices laughing, and Ender waited for silence to return. When it did, he asked, “Who else?”
    A few voices spoke at once, but Bean drowned them out. “Me, I’m Bean, and Peder, Wins, Younger, Lee, and Vlad.”
    Ender thought for a moment. Then he asked what the hell was going on. They laughed again.
    “They can’t break up the group,” Bean said. “We were commanders for maybe two weeks, and here we are at Command School, training with the simulator, and all of a sudden they told us we were going to form a fleet with a new commander. And that’s you.”
    Ender smiled. “Are you boys any good?”
    “If we aren’t, you’ll let us know.”
    Ender chuckled a little. “Might work out. A fleet.”
    For the next ten days Ender trained his toon leaders until they could maneuver their ships like precision dancers. It was like being back in the battleroom again, except that now Ender could always see everything, and could speak to his toon leaders and change their orders at any time. One day as Ender sat down at the control board and switched on the simulator, harsh green lights appeared in the space-the enemy.
    “This is it,” Ender said. “X, Y, bullet, C, D, reserve screen, E, south loop, Bean, angle north.”
    The enemy was grouped in a globe, and outnumbered Ender two to one. Half of Ender’s force was grouped in a tight, bulletlike formation, with the rest in a flat circular screen-except for a tiny force under Bean that moved off the simulator, heading behind the enemy’s formation. Ender quickly learned the enemy’s strategy: whenever Ender’s bullet formation came close, the enemy would give way, hoping to draw Ender inside the globe where he would be surrounded. So Ender obligingly fell into the trap, bringing his bullet to the center of the globe.
    The enemy began to contract slowly, not wanting to come within range until all their weapons could be brought to bear at once. Then Ender began to work in earnest. His reserve screen approached the outside of the globe, and the enemy began to concentrate his forces there. Then Bean’s force appeared on the opposite side, and the enemy again deployed ships on that side. Which left most of the globe only thinly defended. Ender’s bullet attacked, and since at the point of