Surrender

"How many times must I tell you, sir? Bonito de Madrid, nicknamed "Bonzo", was not a part of the boy's training!"

"Forgive my confusion, Colonel, but when we insisted you intervene in that situation you replied that it was vital to his training that we stay out of it. So which is it?"

"Neither. Bonzo was at best an unavoidable impediment to Ender's progress. One we could not remove. It would've been better had he never been a problem in the first place, but as I've explained countless times the boy can never-"

"-have anyone save him, yes, yes. Poor little Wiggin must be all alone to the bitter end. And a side effect of that mindset you've imposed on him is that he will always, always, win his battles by utterly destroying his enemies."

"Do you disagree with that mindset, General?"

"Only in this: what happens when his enemy tries to surrender?"

"Begging your pardon, sir, but it hasn't come up yet. And given the fact that there's been not a single provable incident of buggers attempting to communicate with us, I doubt it will."

.

Ender had perfected the art of yawning with his eyes wide open.

He did everything with his eyes wide open, unable to risk an instant of uncontrolled attention from the screen. Blinking had to be timed to when he was sure there would be no harm in it. And on the rare times he sneezed he found himself wishing it wasn't a biological process that forced his eyes shut at the same time. If he could've had a machine to hold his eyelids pried apart and sprayed mist into his eyes to keep them from getting irritated he would've never closed his eyes at all.

This battle was not so different from the last one he'd done. If Mazer didn't grill him mercilessly on every battle they would've all been blending together into one unmemorable blur by now. An outpost scenario, thirty bugger ships against two of his older models, carrying four fighters each. So eight fighters and two midsized frigates outnumbered three to one. Not the most unfair battle he'd fought recently, but certainly not the most fair.

The only difference he could see was that the enemy ships were motionless. Usually by the time the battle started the enemy was already moving around, in position and utilizing the chaotic swarming pattern meant to simulate bugger tactics. Semi-random maneuvers like a thousand buzzing flies that only a mind like Ender's could see through to the single intelligence that guided them all.

Or his teacher, who created these scenarios.

"Think we're finally fighting a battle where we have the initiative?" Bean asked through his speakers.

"Catch the enemy by surprise?" Shen asked in mock disbelief. "Our teachers, they're not so kind, neh?"

"Eh."

Ender spoke. "Let's not squander an advantage just because we're suspicious of it. We'll move forward like we've caught them unawares, but be ready to respond in case this is some sort of trap."

"How do you respond to a trap when you're walking right into it?" Petra demanded. Ender was glad to hear her voice again after she'd been gone for so long, but sad at the same time because she wasn't the Petra she'd been. He mostly only used her for mop-up, now, when before he'd depended on her. This spark of fire was a good sign, he hoped.

"Petra, she want us to shout a warning before we start shooting?"

Ender cut the banter short, quickly assigning his people to their ships and getting them in position. If they really had caught the enemy off guard they couldn't afford to delay the attack, and anyway with so few ships it didn't take long to prepare a workable strategy.

The enemy's position seemed to be consistent to previous battles, at least. As if they'd interposed themselves between Ender's fleet and some off-screen objective. A colony or an outpost or a valuable transit route, most likely. Mazer never told him the details of the scenario outside what was on the screen, if there even were any.

The fleet moved forward cautiously, clustered tight together to do maximum damage. Such a tight cluster would've been perilous for the enemy, going up against the Dr. Device, but so far they'd shown no hint of using that weapon. Ender had the nagging sense that as part of Mazer's invasion scenario the enemy might get the weapon at some point, and he'd taken pains to keep his ships spread to prevent that, but in this case the small risk of losing several ships to a chain reaction was outweighed by the gains of a close formation.

They came in range. The enemy still wasn't moving. Ender glanced over his shoulder to where Mazer sat in his usual place, impassive. Then he ordered a firing pattern that would inflict maximum devastation in the quickest possible time.

His ships fired, and several enemy ships exploded. Like a kicked anthill the others sprang into motion, forming the usual swarming pattern he was familiar with. "Nova," Ender said. The order was mostly unnecessary, for his friends were already ordering their ships to separate for evasive maneuvers and prepare their own attacks.

For a few moments the battle looked normal, like any other. Then Ender noticed the enemy ships still hadn't fired back. Bean noticed almost immediately after. "These bees have no stingers."

Ender again glanced at Mazer. This was the first time in his experience that the enemy hadn't done their best to destroy him. On the one hand it was an opportunity too good to pass up. Win the battle with zero casualties, not even hull damage on the ships?

Then his mind flashed back to blank eyes, to the feel of dead weight against his foot as he kicked at an already beaten target. "Break off," he ordered tersely.

"I'm not seeing any trap," Fly Molo said. "Let's tear these buggers apart."

"Was my order unclear, soldier?" Ender said coldly.

A split second later his fleet backed away, regrouping out of firing range. The enemy ships immediately went motionless again.

"Weird," Alai murmured. "It's almost like they're rolling over and playing dead. Is this an attempt to surrender?"

"Since when do we fight battles where diplomacy is an issue?" Bean shot back. "So far they've just trained us to be the best at blowing stuff up. We wouldn't even know what to do in a diplomatic situation and testing us on it has no value."

"There's more to fighting than just destroying the enemy," Ender said. "Remember, we're training to lead the forces of humanity."

"Against the buggers," Bean insisted stubbornly. "And with them it's just kill or be killed."

Before he could think of a response one of the enemy ships began slowly drifting forward, like a man nervously stretching his hand out to let a strange dog sniff it. It showed zero hostile intent, and if the enemy was trying to lull them into complacency in order to initiate a surprise attack, doing it with only one ship was the most foolish way to do it. Not to mention the losses they'd already taken.

Unless that one ship had a weapon that could destroy the whole fleet. Ender's eyes darted to his ships, still clustered tightly. Tighter, in fact, than they had been going in, as if the confusion of this strange battle had encouraged them to group together for mutual comfort. Tight enough for an Molecular Disruption field to destroy them all.

"Scatter and destroy that ship," he ordered, mind made up. Mazer hadn't created an enemy he could be friends with, only one he had to destroy. Destruction of the enemy was the only option he ever seemed to have, as much as he hated himself for it. "Bean, Alai, take the bulk of the fleet forward and continue the attack. If they don't want to fire back punish them for the mistake."

His fleet exploded into motion once more, the two frigates shooting down the single enemy fighter while his eight fighters darted forward. This time Bean and Alai's maneuvers were bold, aggressive, cutting a swath through the enemy with little regard for return fire. But not no regard: his commanders weren't fools.

And as one the remaining fifteen or so enemy ships turned and fled.

Their timing was good, speeding away right as the bulk of Ender's fleet was reversing course for a return attack. His fighters hastened to pursue, but the bugger ships still edged them out slightly in speed, especially with the older ships Ender was commanding.

Ender glanced back at his teacher once again. Mazer was leaning forward, eyes intent on the battle as if he was looking at it for the first time. Was that surprise behind his uncaring expression? Confusion?

But one thing was obvious, and that was that his teacher wasn't going to call off the battle just because the enemy was retreating. "Continue pursuit," Ender said. "All speed."

For the next five minutes his ships and the enemy's remained blips on the screen, one blob slowly outpacing the other. He tried every trick he could think of to get some extra speed, using every bit of the area afforded him. There were a few small asteroids, nothing useful, and after about ten minutes of pursuit the right side of the screen filled with a blurry shape that could've been a planet being passed. If that was what the enemy had been defending the way they ignored it in their headlong flight suggested they no longer were.

"They're retreating," Ender finally snapped at Mazer. "We're not going to catch them." His teacher made no response, and Ender gritted his teeth and kept pursuing.

Twenty minutes passed. Thirty. The remnant of the enemy fleet was nearly off the edge of the screen and still fleeing. There was no way they'd catch them.

"They're retreating, all right," Mazer finally said after a frustrating hour of pursuit. "What do you do when the enemy retreats at a speed faster or equivalent to one you can follow at, and they show no sign of any objective besides escape?"

Ender turned to back to the game and ducked his head to talk to everyone. "Withdraw all forces to the objective."

"Is this pointless waste of time finally over?" Alai demanded.

Before Ender could answer Bean cut in. "This battle makes no sense. They're already pushing us day and night to be the best little commanders we can be, and we just wasted an hour and a half on a footrace."

Ender toyed with the idea of dismissing his officers. He was so tired, he didn't want to deal with the same old same old, let alone anything new. "Eh," he said. "Let's ask our enemy."

With that he turned to Mazer.

The old man still held the same position leaning forward in his chair, face an impassive, almost amused mask, as if to eternally ask the question of Ender: "Well?"

This time Ender stared back, waiting for some explanation. He'd thrown up dinner last night, and the nightmares had been so bad he couldn't force himself to sleep for more than an hour. They'd been especially brutal this time, with buggers running through a house like the one he'd lived in with his parents and Valentine and Peter, except in that odd dream way grown into a mansion with endless rooms and corridors for them to break into. Searching, always searching.

He didn't have to be a psychologist to guess that the mansion was his mind. More dreams of buggers rooting through his head.

Finally Mazer spoke. "So you want to debrief now, without a shower or rest?" Ender noticed his teacher didn't mention food, and wondered if that was a bad sign.

"My men are waiting. We want to know what that was."

"Why don't you tell me?"

Ender was in no mood for being "taught" by having to find his own solutions. "Bean's right. An hour and a half wasted on flying around. I thought this training was going to be valuable."

The old man's expression sharpened, the sternest Ender had ever seen it. "You answered your commanders properly, didn't you? You're here to command, not just a ship or a fleet but the entire combined forces of humanity. Command is not all tactics and destroying the enemy. You must also consider diplomacy. For instance, what do you do when the enemy doesn't want to fight?"

"You don't fight?" Ender asked. All his life had led up to that answer. Nothing would please him more than if the buggers just went away and never came back.

"And if that's not an option long-term?" Mazer looked almost angry. Ender thought he knew enough of his teacher's emotions to recognize confusion in there as well, but that didn't make any sense. Mazer was the one who made these scenarios, so what would confuse him?

Maybe this wasn't his teacher's doing after all. Mazer didn't strike him as the type to care about diplomacy, and none of his training had ever prepared him for it. So had some other force in the IF, maybe even Earth itself, demanded an intro to alien negotiations?

Ender thought back to the beginning of the battle, when the enemy had been milling around and not firing even as they were destroyed. Had that been an attempt to open negotiations rather than some odd tactic? "Did I do the right thing, opening fire when they fled?"

Mazer snorted. "Throughout history, the largest "victories" have involved armies slaughtering their enemies as they tried to flee. It's a sound military tactic. " He paused, looking confused again, almost as if he'd forgotten Ender was there, and it was almost a minute before he finished. "But bad for diplomacy," he whispered almost to himself.

"So did I do the right thing?" Ender demanded again. When Mazer got like this he wanted to scream. It was like the teacher was thinking of something outside of training Ender, more important. But since it was his job to train him and even Graff had admitted there was nothing more important, that just made Ender feel like he was being cheated. He put in 100% of his time on this, and Mazer got to ignore him?

Infuriatingly, his teacher merely shrugged and stood. "It's usually historians who decide that. Or politicians. Since it's in the past the outcome has little bearing on what the commander has to do next, and field commanders aren't usually selected to be ambassadors."

"Then what was the point of this?" Ender shouted.

"Ender?" Ender jumped when Crazy Tom's voice sounded in his ear, sounding worried as if he was afraid his commander had gone zombie like Petra. Ender had forgotten his friends were still waiting for him to give them an answer.

He dropped his head. "You're all dismissed. If you want an explanation of what this idiocy was ask the teachers yourselves. I'm sure not getting one."

"Soldier!" Mazer barked. Ender didn't want to, but he reluctantly leapt to his feet to salute, nearly ripping his ears off as his headphones on their cord yanked him back. He flung them onto his seat and turned to stand at attention. "You will never, ever speak like that to your subordinates again. It's not fair to them, it's not fair to your commanding officers, and it won't do you any favors when it comes to people's opinion of you."

"What do I care what people think about me?" Ender demanded. "You're not here to like me, right? Just make sure I win."

"You can't win if your soldiers can't trust you to command them properly," his teacher responded flatly, voice thick with contempt. "And you can't win if your superiors don't trust you to follow orders or uphold their authority. Until I come for you, you're to return to your rooms and think about what it means to be a commander outside the battlefield as well as in it. And while you're at it you can analyze this battle and the enemy's actions and tell me what they meant, as well." His voice suddenly dripped with sarcasm. "Rather than just whining about them."

Ender left, seething with resentment. He'd spent his whole life learning to be a commander at all times. His first year at Battle School had been healing the wounds Graff caused by dividing his launch group. His friends ran to each other and shouted "Nova!" and burst out laughing and none of them even considered including him because he was a commander every second of every day, even when he felt so lonely all he could do was listen to the voices of his friends and wish he could be with them.

Mazer was stern, but he was fair as well. And that rebuke hadn't been fair.

.

"You can call that what you will, sir. But that's the first time in history we've engaged the buggers and they haven't done their best to destroy us."

"So what was that all about? Fluttering around like butterflies, sitting there like corpses when left alone?"

"They can't communicate with us any other way. Maybe that was their attempt to surrender."

"And then when we refused that surrender they opted to flee instead of fight. What does that tell you?"

"That they're done with fighting, obviously."

"Really? Because our forces in Perseus Minor are already being felt out by the defending fleet there. In fact, whether or not you're boy's ready for it he may find himself called in to defend against a sudden attack."

"So one bugger force is fighting, and one is fleeing. Tactical withdrawal until they can find a better time to strike?"

"Maybe. You should know that the planet they were defending launched half a dozen ships. Not fighters, but something like colony ships all at least half a mile in diameter. It almost looked like an evacuating force, flying in the opposite direction of the others. As soon as Ender called off his fleet the remaining buggers set an intercept course for the others."

"You don't think Rackham's right, do you? All his nonsense about queens?"

"It doesn't matter. We're too far in this war for diplomacy. The entire Fleet Command, and a council of civilian leadership from homeworld, agreed on that when we launched the Third Invasion, and they've been agreeing on it again every decade for the last eighty or so years. Ender made the right call in moving to destroy the bugger force even when they showed signs of surrendering."

"We may regret rejecting the olive branch if we fail this invasion."

"The Third Invasion was always intended to exterminate the buggers. As soon as we launched it this became a war of extinction for one of our species. I intend to make it the buggers. I've already ordered the Delta Carsoni fleet to pursue and destroy the evacuating colony ships. They can't move fast, and we should be set to intercept them in less than five hours. Have your boy ready by then."

"And in the meantime he might have to defend against a bugger fleet suddenly attacking a different force? We're killing the poor boy."

"You told me he'd survive long to see this through. If you have to slap him awake and give him a Ritalin do it."

"With all due respect, sir, screw you."

"His performance is slipping, and we can't have that. If we can't find a way to get him the rest he needs then we'll have to improve his performance another way."

"I'm not giving him Ritalin. That's basically meth with a prescription to make it all on the up and up."

"Something else to help him concentrate, then. Adderall?"

"I think one day humanity's going to look back on this time of a pill to solve every problem as one of our darkest hours. And we're doing it to our kids no less."

"That's assuming the buggers let us survive at all."

"Very philosophical."

"You can't deny the fact that he's slowing down. His stomach is tearing itself apart and he barely sleeps."

"And you want to add foreign chemicals on top of that? Don't be absurd. Everything has a tradeoff, and drugs like that are no exception."

"If the tradeoff is destroying the boy to save the world can we really argue against it?"

"Yes we can. Mazer refuses, as do I, and I'll fight you on it right up to the moment you slap an order in front of me signed by the Hegemon, Strategos, and Polemarch in triplicate. Ender's brain is too precious to screw with, and whatever solution to his health problems we find will have to come with diet, exercise, and rest."

"Oh, you mean the three things he's having the most trouble getting? What are you going to do, strap him to a treadmill with an intravenous line in his arm until he collapses from exhaustion, then let him sleep until he wakes up?"

"If I have to. And for the record, if I try that and it fails I'm going to tell the Hegemon it was your idea."

"You son of a bitch."

.

Ender groaned when he saw the screen. Over his earphones his friends were also groaning and loudly complaining.

"Once isn't enough?" Shen demanded. "The teachers, they joking, right?"

"The teachers don't joke," Bean said.

"Oh, you think they value our training too much to screw with us? Tell that to Dragon Army."

"No, I meant none of them have a sense of humor," Bean said.

Ender ignored the banter, watching as the same sixteen enemy fighters swarmed protectively around six huge spherical ships. His already queasy gut lurched at the sight.

Those ships didn't match any he'd seen in any other simulation, but it was obvious they weren't fighting vessels. They moved slowly, their shape would make them maneuver poorly, they had no visible armaments, and above all else they were big.

Ender would've bet a night's sleep that these were civilian ships. So first he'd fired upon an enemy that didn't fire back, then when they fled he'd pursued to destroy them, and now finally here they were escorting civilian vessels too slow to outrun them?

He turned to Mazer. "Orders?"

His teacher showed no expression, as usual. "Have they changed? Destroy the enemy."

"You said in these tests I'd always be about to lose. Not that I'd have a good chance of winning by committing a simulated atrocity."

The old man's eyes narrowed dangerously. "Atrocity, Ender? What an imagination you have."

"Then those aren't civilian vessels?"

"Those are blips on a computer screen," Mazer shot back. "Simulated to be an enemy that intends to destroy Earth and every living person on it. You think the buggers don't have civilians?"

"I won't give the order to fire on them," Ender said. "The fighters, but not those."

His teacher shrugged. "That's fine. But bear in mind the footage from the First Invasion of what happened every time the marines had to cut their way into a bugger ship and fight hand to hand."

He gritted his teeth at that low blow. This enemy wasn't Stilson, or Bonzo, or two armies at once in the Battleroom. He'd fight to survive against an enemy that wanted him dead. But a weaker enemy, one that wasn't fighting? He wasn't Peter.

Fight back, he told the enemy fighters as he ordered his fleet in to attack. And, to his relief, they did.

For all the comparatively few numbers of enemy ships and the fact that they had to spend much of their strength defending the six large ships, the enemy fought more savagely than he'd seen before. They moved swifter, their attacks came more brutal, and their determination was fierce. As if they had something to defend. That pushed some button in Ender's tired mind as he watched two of his own ships in a row get shot down, and with effort he forced his mind to clear and looked.

And, like when he'd watched the videos of the Mazer's fight in the Second Invasion, he saw.

There was a queen. Mazer's words about the Second Invasion being a colonizing effort with queen included buzzed in his head as he watched the enemy fight as they never had before when they had nothing real to protect. And like he'd done before, watching the battle of the Second Invasion with Mazer, he looked at it through the enemy's eyes, saw which ship the perspective of the battle focused on.

"Bean," he said quietly, highlighting one of the fighters in the thick of the battle. "Focus all efforts on destroying that."

Behind him he thought he heard Mazer sigh. Bean's strike force of two fighters darted in, feinting at one of the spherical ships, and then abruptly shifted and fired on the targeted fighter. It juked, nearly dodged, and then exploded in a flash of light.

Like puppets with their strings cut every single other enemy ship, including the six big ones, went dead, flying whatever trajectories they'd held before their queen perished. Ender's friends didn't notice, treating the battle as normal as they destroyed an enemy that was already dead. Only Alai commented on how easy it was.

"Should we destroy the big ones, Ender?" Hot Soup asked, jarring Ender out of his dazed shock.

"We can't fire on civilians!" Dean protested, sounding shocked.

"The battle's not over or our screens would've gone blank," Hot Soup insisted. "We need to destroy the enemy."

Ender glanced back at Mazer, infuriated by that calm, expressionless gaze. He didn't miss the gleam in his teacher's eye, the tense way he held his armrests.

That was a good point, really. The battle was over. Mazer had to know it as much as he did. So why was it still going? Just to rub in his atrocity?

At least it was only a game. When it came time to make the real decisions he wouldn't have to hurt anyone. Not like this. "Destroy them," he said quietly.

Without waiting for a response he tossed his earphones aside and stood, staggering slightly. Mazer appeared at his side, supporting him, but Ender shoved him away and stumbled to the door, making his way down familiar corridors to his room. He left the door open behind him as he sprawled across his bed, closed his eyes, and slept.

His dreamed of a bugger funeral, but when the little insectoids lowered the open casket into the ground it wasn't a queen inside, but Valentine.

.

"Well that's that. It's us or them now."

"It's always been us or them. Even the buggers had to realize it."

"Before now we were able to pretend it wasn't."

"No more pretense now. Think the buggers will be pissed?"

"No more pissed than we are. They're the ones who started by slaughtering hundreds of millions of us."

"Ender's not pissed, though."

"No. He's just going to destroy them ruthlessly."