And then there were the even-less-relevant lessons on the workings of starships. What did Ender care? He was never going to be regular fleet. He had no interest in captaining any vessel of any size.
On the third day of his walk-through of the ship that would carry him and his colonists, Ender was so tired of phony nautical terminology transferred to starships that he found himself making sarcastic remarks. Fortunately, he didn't actually say them, he only thought them. Do we swab the decks, matey? Will the bosun pipe us aboard? How many degrees will she tack into the wind, sir?
'You know,' said the captain who had Ender duty today, 'the real barrier to interstellar flight wasn't just getting up to lightspeed. It was overcoming the collision problem.'
'You mean with all of space to work in. ' Then, from the captain's smirk, Ender realized he had fallen into a little trap. 'Ah. You mean collisions with space debris.'
'All those old vids showing spaceships dodging through asteroid clusters — they weren't actually far off. Because when you hit a molecule of hydrogen when you're near lightspeed, it releases a huge amount of energy. Like hitting a huge rock at a much slower speed. Tears you up. Any shielding scheme our ancestors came up with involved so much additional mass, or cost so much energy and therefore fuel, that it simply wasn't practical. You had so much mass that you couldn't carry enough fuel to get anywhere.'
'So how did we finally solve it?' asked Ender.
'Well of course we didn't,' said the captain.
Again, Ender could see that this was an old prank to play on novices, and so he gave the man the pleasure of showing off his superior knowledge. 'Then how are we getting from star to star?' asked Ender. Instead of saying, Ah, so it's formic technology.
'The formics did it for us,' said the captain with delight. 'When they got here, yes, they devastated parts of China and damn near whupped us in the first two wars. But they also taught us. The very fact that they got here told us that it could be done. And then they thoughtfully left behind dozens of working starships for us to study.'
The captain had by now led Ender to the very front of the ship, through several doors that required the highest security clearance to enter. 'Not everybody gets to see this, but I was told that you were to see everything.'
It was crystalline in substance and ovoid in shape, except that it came to a sharp point at the back. 'Please don't tell me it's an egg,' said Ender.
The captain chuckled. 'Don't tell anybody, but the engines of this ship, and all that fuel — they're just for maneuvering near planets and moons and such. And getting the ship going. Once we get up to one percent of lightspeed, we switch on this baby, and from then on, it's just a matter of controlling the intensity and direction.'
'Of what?'
'Of the drive field,' said the captain. 'It was such an elegant solution, but we hadn't even discovered the area of science that would have gotten us to this.'
'And what area is that?'
'Strong force field dynamics,' said the captain. 'When people speak of it, they almost always say that the strong force field breaks apart molecules, but that's not the real story. What it really does is change the direction of the strong force. Molecules simply can't hold together when the nuclei of all the constituent atoms start to prefer a particular direction of movement at lightspeed.'
Ender knew he was pouring on technical terms, but he was tired of the game. 'What you're saying is that the field generated by this device takes all the molecules and objects it runs into in the direction of movement and uses the nuclear strong force to make them move in a uniform direction at lightspeed.'
The captain grinned. 'Touche. But you're an admiral, sir, and so I was giving you the show I give all the admirals.' He winked. 'Most of them don't have a clue what I'm saying, and they're too stuffed to admit it and ask me to translate.'
'What happens to the energy from the breaking of the molecules into their constituent atoms?' asked Ender.
'That, sir, is what powers the ship. No, I'll be more specific. That's what actually moves the ship. It's so beautiful. We move forward under rockets, and then we switch off the engines — can't be generating molecules of our own! — and turn on the egg — yeah, we call it the egg. The field goes up — it's shaped exactly like the crystal ball here — and the leading edges start colliding with molecules and tearing them up. The atoms are channeled along the field and they all emerge at the trailing point. Giving us an incredible amount of thrust. I've talked to physicists who still don't get it. They say there isn't enough energy stored in the molecular bonds to produce the thrust — they've come up with all kinds of theories about where the extra energy is coming from.'
'And we got this from the formics.'
'There was one terrible accident the first time we turned on one of these. Of course they weren't using them in-system. But we had one of our cruisers simply disappear because it was docked right up against a formic ship when the egg got turned on. Poof. Every molecule in the cruiser — including the unluckiest crew in history — got incorporated into the field, then got spit out the back, and made the formic ship itself jump like a bullet halfway across the solar system.'
'Didn't that kill the people on the formic ship, too? To jump that fast?'
'No. Because the formic anti-grav — technically, anti-inertial — was on. Powered by the egg reaction, too, of course. It's like all the molecules in space were put there to be cheap fuel for our ships and everything on them. Anyway, the anti-gravs compensated for the jump and the only problem was communicating with IFCom to tell them what happened. Without the cruiser, no communications except short-range radio.'
The captain went on to tell about the clever way the men on the formic ship attracted the attention of rescuers, but Ender's concentration was on something else — something so disturbing that it made him lightheaded and a little nauseated from the shock of it.
The egg, the strong force field generator, obviously was the source of the molecular disruption device. What the captain had just described was the reaction that was in the M.D. Device, the 'Little Doctor,' which Ender had used to destroy the formic home planet and kill all the hive queens.
Ender thought it was a technology that humans had come up with on their own. But it was clearly based on formic technology. You just take away the controls that shape the field, and you've got a field that chews up everything in its path and spits it out as raw atoms. A field that sustains itself on the energy it generates by playing with the strong nuclear force. A planet-eater.
The formics had to recognize it when Ender used it the first time. It wasn't mysterious to them — they'd recognize it immediately as a raw, uncontrolled weaponization of the principle that powered every formic starship.
Between the time of that battle and the final one, the formics surely had the time to do the same thing — to weaponize the strong force field generator and use it against the humans before they came in range.
They absolutely knew what the weapon was. They could have made their own whenever they wanted. But they didn't do it. They just sat there waiting for Ender.
They gave us the stardrive we used to get to them, and the weapon we used to kill them. They gave us everything.
We humans are supposed to be so clever. So inventive. Yet this was completely beyond our reach. We make desks with clever holodisplays that we can play really fun games on. Plus send each other letters over vast distances. But compared to them, we didn't even know how to kill properly. While they knew how — but chose not to use the technology that way.
'Well, this part of the tour usually bores people,' said the captain.
'No, I wasn't bored. Truly. I was just thinking.'
'About what?'
'Stuff that's too classified to talk about using any method but telepathy,' said Ender. Which was true — the existence of the M.D. Device was only on a need-to-know basis, and the secret had been well kept. Even the men who deployed and used the weapons didn't understand what they were and what they could do. The soldiers who had seen the Little Doctor consume a planet were dead, lost in the same vast chain reaction. The soldiers who had seen it used in one of the early battles just thought of it as an incredibly big bomb. Only the top brass understood it — and Ender, because Mazer Rackham had insisted that he had to be told what the weapons he carried actually
