Xenocide (Ender Wiggins Saga)

wheezing lungs, while waving his arms and squatting and standing: our ritual of obeisance to the almighty descolada. Thus we humiliate ourselves before the undisputed master of life on this planet.
    Finally it was done; I've been roasted to a turn, he thought. As fresh air finally rushed into the shed, he took his clothes out of the box and put them on, still hot. As soon as he left the shed, it would be heated so that every surface was far over the proven heat tolerance of the descolada virus. Nothing could live in that shed during this final step of purification. Next time someone came to the shed it would be absolutely sterile.
    Yet Ender couldn't help but think that somehow the descolada virus would find a way through-- if not through the shed, then through the mild disruption barrier that surrounded the experimental crop area like an invisible fortress wall. Officially, no molecule larger than a hundred atoms could pass through that barrier without being broken up. Fences on either side of the barrier kept humans and piggies from straying into the fatal area-- but Ender had often imagined what it would be like for someone to pass through the disruption field. Every cell in the body would be killed instantly as the nucleic acids broke apart. Perhaps the body would hold together physically. But in Ender's imagination he always saw the body crumbling into dust on the other side of the barrier, the breeze carrying it away like smoke before it could hit the ground.
    What made Ender most uncomfortable about the disruption barrier was that it was based on the same principle as the Molecular Disruption Device. Designed to be used against starships and missiles, it was Ender who turned it against the home planet of the buggers when he commanded the human warfleet three thousand years ago. And it was the same weapon that was now on its way from Starways Congress to Lusitania. According to Jane, Starways Congress had already attempted to send the order to use it. She had blocked that by cutting off ansible communications between the fleet and the rest of humanity, but there was no telling whether some overwrought ship's captain, panicked because his ansible wasn't working, might still use it on Lusitania when he got here.
    It was unthinkable, but they had done it-- Congress had sent the order to destroy a world. To commit xenocide. Had Ender written The Hive Queen in vain? Had they already forgotten?
    But it wasn't "already" to them. It was three thousand years to most people. And even though Ender had written The Life of Human , it wasn't believed widely enough yet. It hadn't been embraced by the people to such a degree that Congress wouldn't dare to act against the pequeninos.
    Why had they decided to do it? Probably for exactly the same purpose as the xenobiologists' disruption barrier: to isolate a dangerous infection so it couldn't spread into the wider population. Congress was probably worried about containing the plague of planetary revolt. But when the fleet reached here, with or without orders, they might be as likely to use the Little Doctor as the final solution to the descolada problem: If there were no planet Lusitania, there would be no self-mutating half-intelligent virus itching for a chance to wipe out humanity and all its works.
    It wasn't that long a walk from the experimental fields to the new xenobiology station. The path wound over a low hill, skirting the edge of the wood that provided father, mother, and living cemetery to this tribe of pequeninos, and then on to the north gate in the fence that surrounded the human colony.
    The fence was a sore point with Ender. There was no reason for it to exist anymore, now that the policy of minimal contact between humans and pequeninos had broken down, and both species passed freely through the gate. When Ender arrived on Lusitania, the fence was charged with a field that caused any person entering it to suffer excruciating pain. During the struggle to win the right to communicate freely with the pequeninos, Ender's oldest stepson, Miro, was trapped in the field for several minutes, causing irreversible brain damage. Yet Miro's experience was only the most painful and immediate expression of what the fence did to the souls of the humans enclosed within it. The psychobarrier had been shut off thirty years ago. In all that time, there had been no reason to have any barrier between humans and pequeninos-- yet the fence remained. The human colonists of Lusitania