Xenocide

“It makes no sense,” said Miro.

“Not from the surface,” said Valentine, remembering Rov. “But if you could travel the tu

“What about the tall buildings?” asked Miro.

“The water table is their downward limit. If they need greater height, they have to go up.”

“What are they doing that requires a building so tall?” asked Miro.

“I don't know,” said Valentine. They were skirting a building that was at least three hundred meters high; in the near distance they could see more than a dozen others.

For the first time on this excursion, Plikt spoke up. “Rockets,” she said.

Valentine caught a glimpse of Ender smiling a bit and nodding slightly. So Plikt had confirmed his own suspicions.

“What for?” asked Miro.

Valentine almost said, To get into space, of course! But that wasn't fair– Miro had never lived on a world that was struggling to get into space for the first time. To him, going offplanet meant taking the shuttle to the orbiting station. But the single shuttle used by the humans of Lusitania would hardly do for transporting material outward for any kind of major deepspace construction program. And even if it could do the job, the hive queen was unlikely to ask for human help.

“What's she building, a space station?” asked Valentine.

“I think so,” said Ender. “But so many rockets, and such large ones– I think she's pla

Valentine almost answered with exasperation– how should I know? Then she realized that he wasn't asking her. Because almost at once he supplied the answer himself. Which meant that he must have been asking the computer in his ear. No, not a “computer.” Jane. He was asking Jane. It was still hard for Valentine to get used to the idea that even though there were only four people in the car, there was a fifth person present, looking and listening through the jewels Ender and Miro both wore.

“She could do it all at once,” said Ender. “In fact, given what's known about the chemical emissions here, the hive queen has smelted enough metal to construct not only a space station but also two small long-range starships of the sort that the first bugger expedition brought. Their version of a colony ship.”

“Before the fleet arrives,” said Valentine. She understood at once. The hive queen was preparing to emigrate. She had no intention of letting her species be trapped on a single planet when the Little Doctor came again.

“You see the problem,” said Ender. “She won't tell us what she's doing, and so we have to rely on what Jane observes and what we can guess. And what I'm guessing isn't a very pretty picture.”

“What's wrong with the buggers getting offplanet?” asked Valentine.

“Not just the buggers,” said Miro.

Valentine made the second co

“That's what they intend,” said Ender. “But the way I see it is– two ships for the descolada.”

“Nossa Senhora,” whispered Miro.

Valentine felt a chill go through her. It was one thing for the hive queen to seek the salvation of her species. But it was quite another thing for her to carry the deadly self-adapting virus to other worlds.

“You see my quandary,” said Ender. “You see why she won't tell me directly what she's doing.”

“But you couldn't stop her anyway, could you?” asked Valentine.

“He could warn the Congress fleet,” said Miro.

That's right. Dozens of heavily armed starships, converging on Lusitania from every direction– if they were warned about two starships leaving Lusitania, if they were given their original trajectories, they could intercept them. Destroy them.

“You can't,” said Valentine.

“I can't stop them and I can't let them go,” said Ender. “To stop them would be to risk destroying the buggers and the piggies alike. To let them go would be to risk destroying all of humanity.”

“You have to talk to them. You have to reach some kind of agreement.”

“What would an agreement with us be worth?” asked Ender. “We don't speak for humanity in general. And if we make threats, the hive queen will simply destroy all our satellites and probably our ansible as well. She may do that anyway, just to be safe.”

“Then we'd really be cut off,” said Miro.

“From everything,” said Ender.

It took Valentine a moment to realize that they were thinking of Jane. Without an ansible, they couldn't speak to her anymore. And without the satellites that orbited Lusitania, Jane's eyes in space would be blinded.

“Ender, I don't understand,” said Valentine. “Is the hive queen our enemy?”

“That's the question, isn't it?” asked Ender. “That's the trouble with restoring her species. Now that she has her freedom again, now that she's not bundled up in a cocoon hidden in a bag under my bed, the hive queen will act in the best interest of her species– whatever she thinks that is.”

“But Ender, it can't be that there has to be war between humans and buggers again.”

“If there were no human fleet heading toward Lusitania, the question wouldn't come up.”

“But Jane has disrupted their communications,” said Valentine. “They can't receive the order to use the Little Doctor.”

“For now,” said Ender. “But Valentine, why do you think Jane risked her own life in order to cut off their communications?”

“Because the order was sent.”

“Starways Congress sent the order to destroy this planet. And now that Jane has revealed her power, they'll be all the more determined to destroy us. Once they find a way to get Jane out of the way, they'll be even more certain to act against this world.”

“Have you told the hive queen?”

“Not yet. But then, I'm not sure how much she can learn from my mind without my wanting her to. It's not exactly a means of communication that I know how to control.”

Valentine put her hand on Ender's shoulder. “Was this why you tried to persuade me not to come see the hive queen? Because you didn't want her to learn the real danger?”

“I just don't want to face her again,” said Ender. “Because I love her and I fear her. Because I'm not sure whether I should help her or try to destroy her. And because once she gets those rockets into space, which could be any day now, she could take away our power to stop her. Take away our co

And, again, what he didn't say: She could cut Ender and Miro off from Jane.

“I think we definitely need to have a talk with her,” said Valentine.

“Either that or kill her,” said Miro.

“Now you understand my problem,” said Ender.

They rode on in silence.

The entrance to the hive queen's burrow was a building that looked like any other. There was no special guard– indeed, in their whole excursion they hadn't seen a single bugger. Valentine remembered when she was young, on her first colony world, trying to imagine what the bugger cities had looked like when they were fully inhabited. Now she knew– they looked exactly the way they did when they were dead. No scurrying buggers; like ants swarming over the hills. Somewhere, she knew, there were fields and orchards being tended under the open sun, but none of that was visible from here.

Why did this make her feel so relieved?

She knew the answer to the question even as she asked it. She had spent her childhood on Earth during the Bugger Wars; the insectoid aliens had haunted her nightmares, as they had terrified every other child on Earth. Only a handful of human beings, however, had ever seen a bugger in person, and few of those were still alive when she was a child. Even in her first colony, where the ruins of bugger civilization surrounded her, they had found not even one desiccated corpse. All her visual images of the buggers were the horrifying images from the vids.