"Russia."
"I meant where in Russia."
"Far from any borders, they assure us."
"What are our resources?"
"Very thick walls. No tools. Constant observation. They weigh our bodily wastes, I'm not kidding."
"What have they got us doing?"
"Like a really dumbed-down Battle School. We put up with it for a long time till Fly Molo finally gave up and when one of the teachers was quoting one of Von Clausewitz's stupider generalizations, Fly continued the quotation, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, and the rest of us joined in as best we could -- I mean, nobody has a memory like Fly, but we do OK -- and they finally got the idea that we could teach the stupid classes to them. So now it's just ... war games."
"Again? You think they're going to spring it on us later that the games are real?"
"No, this is just planning stuff. Strategy for a war between Russia and Turkmenistan. Russia and an alliance between Turkmenistan, Kasakhstan,, Azerbaijan, and Turkey. War with the United States and Canada. War with the old NATO alliance except Germany. War with Germany. On and on. China. India. Really stupid stuff, too, like between Brazil and Peru, which makes no sense but maybe they were testing our compliance or something."
"All this in five weeks?"
"Three weeks of kuso classes, and then two weeks of war games. When we finish our plan, see, they run it on the computer to show us how it went. Someday they're going to catch on that the only way to do this that isn't a waste of time is to have one of us making the plan for the opponent as well."
"My guess is you just told them."
"I've told them before but they're hard to persuade. Typical military types. Makes you understand why the whole concept of Battle School was developed in the first place. If the war had been up to adults, there'd be Buggers at every breakfast table in the world by now."
"But they are listening?"
"I think they record it all and play it back at slow speeds to see if we're passing messages subvocally."
Petra smiled.
"So why did you finally decide to cooperate?" he asked.
She shrugged. "I don't think I decided."
"Hey, they don't pull you out of the room until you express really sincere interest in being a good, compliant little kid."
She shook her head. "I don't think I did that."
"Yeah, well, whatever you did, you were the last of Ender's jeesh to break, kid."
A short buzzer sounded.
"Time's up," said Dink. He got up, leaned over, kissed her brow, and left the room.
Six weeks later, Petra was actually enjoying the life. By complying with the kids' demands, their captors had finally come up with some decent equipment. Software that allowed them very realistic head-to-head strategic and tactical war-gaming. Access to the nets so they could do decent research into terrains and capabilities so their wargaming had some realism -- though they knew every message they sent was censored, because of the number of messages that were rejected for one obscure reason or another. They enjoyed each other's company, exercised together, and by all appearances seemed to be completely happy and compliant Russian commanders.
Yet Petra knew, as they all knew, that every one of them was faking. Holding back. Making dumb mistakes which, if they were made in combat, would lead to gaps that a clever enemy could exploit. Maybe their captors realized this, and maybe they didn't. At least it made them all feel better, though they never spoke of it. But since they were all doing it, and cooperating by not exposing those weaknesses by exploiting them in the games, they could only assume that everyone felt the same about it.
They chatted comfortably about a lot of things -- their disdain for their captors, memories of Ground School, Battle School, Command School. And, of course, Ender. He was out of the reach of these bastards, so they made sure to mention him a lot, to talk about how the IF was bound to use him to counter all these foolish plans the Russians were making. They knew they were blowing smoke, that the IF wouldn't do anything, they even said so. But still, Ender was there, the ultimate trump card.
Till the day one of the erstwhile teachers told them that a colony ship had gone, with Ender and his sister Valentine aboard.
"I didn't even know he had a sister," said Hot Soup.
No one said anything, but they all knew that this was impossible. They had all known Ender had a sister. But ... whatever Hot Soup was doing, they'd play along and see what the game was.
"No matter what they tell us, one thing we know," said Hot Soup. "Wiggin is still with us."
Again, they weren't sure what he meant by this. After the briefest pause, though, Shen clapped his hand to his chest and cried out, "In our hearts forever."
"Yes," said Hot Soup. "Ender is in our hearts."
Just the tiniest extra emphasis on the name "Ender."
But he had said Wiggin before.
And before that, he had called attention to the fact that they all knew Ender had a sister. They also knew that Ender had a brother. Back on Eros, while Ender was in bed recovering from his breakdown after finding out the battles had been real, Mazer Rackham had told them some things about Ender. And Bean had told them more, as they were trapped together while the League War played itself out. They had listened as Bean expounded on what Ender's brother and sister meant to him, that the reason Ender had been born at all during the days of the two-child law was because his brother and sister were so brilliant, but the brother was too dangerously aggressive and the sister too passively compliant. How Bean knew all this he wouldn't tell, but the information was indelibly planted in their memories, tied as it was with those tense days after their victory over the Formics and before the defeat of the Polemarch in his attempt to take over the IF.
So when Hot Soup said "Wiggin is still with us," he had not been referring to Ender or Valentine, because they most assuredly were not "with us."
Peter, that was the brother's name. Peter Wiggin. Hot Soup was telling them that he was one whose mind was perhaps as brilliant as Ender's, and he was still on Earth. Maybe, if they could somehow contact him on the outside, he would ally himself with his brother's battle companions. Maybe he could find a way to get them free.
The game now was to find some way to communicate with him.
Sending email would be pointless -- the last thing they needed to do was have their captors see a bunch of email addressed to every possible variant of Peter Wiggin's name at every single mailnet that they could think of. And sure enough, by that evening Alai was telling them some tall tale about a genie in a bottle that had washed up on the shore. Everyone listened with feigned interest, but they knew the real story had been stated right at the beginning, when Alai said, "The fisherman thought maybe the bottle had a message from some castaway, but when he popped the cork, a cloud of smoke came out and ..." and they got it. What they had to do was send a message in a bottle, a message that would go indiscriminately to everyone everywhere, but which could only be understood by Ender's brother, Peter.
But as she thought about it, Petra realized that with all these other brilliant brains working to reach Peter Wiggin, she might as well work on an alternative plan. Peter Wiggin was not the only one outside who might help them. There was Bean. And while Bean was almost certainly in hiding, so that he would have far less freedom of action than Peter Wiggin, that didn't mean they couldn't still find him.
She thought about it for a week in every spare moment, rejecting idea after idea.
Then she thought of one that might get past the censors.
She worked out the text of her message very carefully in her head, making sure that it was phrased and worded exactly right. Then, with that memorized, she figured the binary code of each letter in standard two-byte format, and memorized that. Then she started the really hard stuff. All done in her head, so nothing was ever committed to paper or typed into the computer, where a keystroke monitor could report to their captors whatever she wrote.
In the meantime, she found a complex black-and-white drawing of a dragon on a netsite somewhere in Japan and saved it as a small file. When she finally had the message fully encoded in her mind, it took only a few minutes of fiddling with the drawing and she was done. She added it as part of her signature on every letter she sent. She spent so little time on it that she did not think it would look to her captors like anything more than a harmless whim. If they asked, she could say she added the picture in memory of Ender's Dragon Army in Battle School.
Of course, it wasn't just a picture of a dragon anymore. Now there was a little poem under it.
Share this dragon.
If you do,
lucky end for
them and you.