Shadow of the Hegemon, the - Book 2 (Ender)

shoulder to shoulder to defend India against the invader whose only god is power and whose worship is cruelty.
    Many members of the Indian government, military, and educational system will flee to Pakistan. I beg you to open your borders to them, for if they remain in India, only death or captivity will be in their future. All other Indians have no reason to fear individual persecution from the Chinese, and I beg you not to flee to Pakistan, but rather to remain inside India, where, God willing, you will soon be liberated.
    I myself will remain in India, to bear whatever burden is placed upon my people by the conqueror. I would rather be Mandela than de Gaulle. There is to be no governmentin-exile. Pakistan is the government of the Indian people now. I say this with the full authority of Congress.
    May God bless all honorable people, and keep them free.

    Your brother and friend, Tikal Chapekar
    Jetting over the dry southern reaches of India felt to Bean like a strange dream, where the landscape never changed. Or no, it was a vidgame, with a computer making up scenery on the fly, recycling the same algorithms to create the same type of scenery in general, but never quite the same in detail.
    Like human beings. DNA that differed by only the tiniest amounts from person to person, and yet those differences giving rise to saints and monsters, fools and geniuses, builders and wreckers, lovers and takers. More people live in this one country, India, than lived in the whole world only three or four centuries ago. More people live here today than lived in the entire history of the world up to the time of Christ. All the history of the Bible and the Iliad and Herodotus and Gilgamesh and everything that had been pieced together by archaeologists and anthropologists, all of those human relationships, all those achievements, could all have been played out by the people we're flying over right now, with people left over to live through new stories that no one would ever hear.
    In these few days, China would conquer enough people to make five thousand years of human history, and they would treat them like grass, to be mown till all were the same level, with anything that rose above that level discarded to be mere compost.
    And what am I doing? Riding along on a machine that would have given that old prophet Ezekiel a heart attack before he could even write about seeing a shark in the sky. Sister Carlotta used to joke that Battle School was the wheel in the sky that Ezekiel saw in his vision. So here I am, like a figure out of some ancient vision, and what am I doing? That's right, out of the billions of people I might have saved, I'm choosing the one I happen to know and like the best, and risking the lives of a couple of hundred good soldiers in order to do it. And if we get out of this alive, what will I do then? Spend the few years of life remaining to me, helping Peter Wiggin defeat Achilles so he can do exactly what Achilles is already so close to doing-unite humanity under the rule of one sick, ambitious marubo?
    Sister Carlotta liked to quote from another biblical git-vanity, vanity, all is vanity. There is nothing new under the sun. A time to scatter rocks and a time to gather rocks together.
    Well, as long as God didn't tell anybody what the rocks were for, I might as well leave the rocks and go get my friend, if I can.
    As they approached Hyderabad, they picked up a lot of radio chatter. Tactical stuff from satrads, not just the net traffic you'd expect because of the Chinese surprise attack in Burma that had been triggered by Peter's essay. As they got closer, the onboard computers were able to distinguish the radio signatures of Chinese troops as well as Indian.
    "Looks like Achilles' retrieval crew got here ahead of us," said Suriyawong.
    "But no shooting," said Bean. "Which means they've already got to the planning room and they're holding the Battle Schoolers as hostages."
    "You got it," said Suriyawong. "Three choppers on the roof."
    "There'll be more on the ground, but let's complicate their lives and take out those three."
    Virlomi had misgivings. "What if they think it's the Indian Army attacking and they kill the hostages?"
    "Achilles is not so stupid he won't make sure who's doing the shooting before he starts using up his ticket home."
    It was like target practice, and three missiles took out three choppers, just like that.
    "Now get us onto blades and show the Thai markings," said Suriyawong.
    It was, as