Shadow of the giant

naturally
conceived will bring them like hounds. Their resources are unlimited. They will
spare no effort in their search. And when they find a woman that they even
think might be the mother of his child, they will kill her, just in case."
    "But there must be hundreds. Thousands of women who
have babies implanted," Randi protested.
    "Are you a Christian?" asked the man. "You've
heard of the slaughter of the innocents? However many you have to kill, it's
worth it to these monsters, as long as it means they can prevent the birth of
this child."
    Randi watched the stills of Achilles during his Battle
School days and soon after, during his time at the asylum where his enemies had
him confined after it became clear that he was a better commander than their
precious Ender Wiggin. She had read it on the nets in many places, the fact
that Ender Wiggin actually used plans devised by Achilles in order to beat the
Buggers. They could glorify their phony little hero all they wanted—but
everyone knew it was only because he was Peter Wiggin's little brother that
Ender was given all the credit.
    It was Achilles who had saved the world. And Achilles who
had fathered the baby she had been chosen to bear.
    Randi's only regret was that she could not be the biological
mother as well, and that the child could not have been naturally conceived. But
she knew that the bride of Achilles must have been very carefully chosen—a
woman who could contribute the right genes so as not to dilute his brilliance
and goodness and creativity and drive.
    But they knew about the woman Achilles loved, and if she had
been pregnant when he died, they would have torn the womb out of her so she
could lie there in agony and watch them burn the fetus before her eyes.
    So to protect the mother and the baby, Achilles had arranged
for their embryo to be taken secretly and implanted in the womb of a woman who
could be trusted to take the child to term and give him a good home and raise
him with full awareness of his vast potential. To teach him secretly who he
really was and whose cause he served, so he could grow up to fulfill his
father's cruelly-blocked destiny. It was a sacred trust, and Randi was worthy
of it.
    Bob was not. It was that simple. Randi had always known that
she married beneath herself. Bob was a good provider, but he hadn't the
imagination to understand anything more important than making a living and
planning his next fishing trip. She could just imagine how he would respond if
she told him that not only was she pregnant, but the baby was not even hers.
    Already she had found several places on the web where people
were searching for "lost" or "kidnapped" embryos. She
knew—the man who spoke to her had warned her—that these were likely to
originate from Achilles's enemies, trolling for information that would lead
them to... to her.
    She wondered if maybe the very act of searching for people
searching for embryos would alert them. The search companies claimed that no
government had access to their databases, but it was possible that the
International Fleet was intercepting all the messages and monitoring all the
searches. People said that the I.F. was really under the control of the United
States government, that America's isolationism was a facade and it ran
everything through the I.F. Then there were the people who said that it was the
other way around—the U.S. was isolationist because that was the way the I.F.
wanted it, since most of the space technology they depended on was developed
and built in the U.S.
    It couldn't be an accident that Peter the Hegemon was
American himself.
    She would stop searching for information about kidnapped
embryos. It was all lies and traps and tricks. She knew she would seem paranoid
to anyone else, but that's only because they didn't know what she knew. There
really were monsters in the world, and those who kept secrets from them had to
live with constant vigilance.
    There on the screen was that terrible picture. They showed
it over and over again: Achilles's poor broken body lying on the floor in the
Hegemon's palace, looking so peaceful, not a wound on his body. Some on the
nets said that Delphiki didn't shoot him through the eye at all; that if he
had, Achilles's face would have been powder-burned and there would have been an
exit wound and blood all over.
    No, Delphiki and Wiggin imprisoned Achilles and faked some
kind of phony standoff with the police, pretending that Achilles was taking
hostages or