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

genius, he'll know that."
    "I wonder if Achilles knows that, as he's trying to squeeze brilliance out of the other children."
    "Exactly. Between Peter Wiggin and Achilles, what are the odds that Wiggin could be worse?"
    "Oh, it's hard to imagine how that could be."
    "So let's start thinking of a way to contact Locke without giving away our identity and our location."
    "I'm going to need more mexerica oranges before we leave Brasil," said Carlotta.
    Only then did he notice that the two of them had already blown through the whole bagful. "Me too," he said.
    As she left, the empty bag in hand, she paused at the door. "You did very well with that message, Julian Delphiki."
    "Thanks, Grandma Carlotta."
    She left smiling.
    Bean held up the message and scanned it again. The only part of the message that he hadn't fully interpreted for her was the last word. He didn't think "ptr" meant Peter. That would have been redundant. "Wiggin" was enough to identify him. No, the "ptr" at the end was a signature. This message was from Petra. She could have tried to write directly to Peter Wiggin. But she had written to Bean, coding it in a way that Peter would never have understood.
    She's relying on me.
    Bean knew how the others in Ender's jeesh had resented him. Not a lot, but a little. When they were all in Command School on Eros, before Ender arrived, the military had made Bean the acting com mander in all their test battles, even though he was the youngest of them all, even younger than Ender. He knew he'd done a good job, and won their respect. But they never liked taking orders from him and were undisguisedly happy when Ender arrived and Bean was dropped back to be one of them. Nobody ever said, "Good job, Bean," or "Hey, you did OK." Except Petra.
    She had done for him on Eros the same thing that Nikolai had done for him in Battle School-provided him with a kind word now and then. He was sure that neither Nikolai nor Petra ever realized how important their casual generosity had been to him. But he remembered that when he needed a friend, the two of them had been there for him. Nikolai had turned out, by the workings of notentirely-coincidental fate, to be his brother. Did that make Petra his sister?
    It was Petra who reached out to him now. She trusted him to recognize the message, decode it, and act on it.
    There were files in the Battle School record system that said that Bean was not human, and he knew that Graff at least sometimes felt that way because he had overheard those words from his own lips. He knew that Carlotta loved him but she loved Jesus more and anyway, she was old and thought of him as a child. He could rely on her, but she did not rely on him.
    In his Earthside life before Battle School, the only friend Bean had ever had was a girl named Poke, and Achilles had murdered her long before. Murdered her only moments after Bean left her, and moments before he realized his mistake and rushed back to warn her and instead found her body floating in the Rhine. She died trying to save Bean, and she died because Bean couldn't be relied upon to take as much care to save her.
    Petra's message meant that maybe he had another friend who needed him after all. And this time, he would not turn his back. This time it was his turn to save his friend, or die trying. How's that for a cause, Sister Carlotta?
    GOING PUBLIC
    To:Demosthenes%[email protected], Locke%[email protected]
    From: [email protected] Re: Achilles heel
    Dear Peter Wiggin,
    A message smuggled to me from the kidnapped children confirms they are (or were, at the time of sending) together, in Russia near the sixty-fourth parallel, doing their best to sabotage those trying to exploit their military talents. Since they will doubtless be separated and moved frequently, the exact location is unimportant, and I am quite sure you already knew Russia was the only country with both the ambition and the means to acquire all the members of Ender's jeesh.
    I'm sure you recognize the impossibility of releasing these children through military intervention-at the slightest sign of a plausible effort to extract them, they will be killed in order to deprive an enemy of such assets. But it might be possible to persuade either the Russian government or some if not all of those holding the individual children that releasing them is in Russia's best interest. This might be accomplished by exposing the individual who is almost certainly behind this audacious action, and