So steel yourself for reams of information. Graff tells me that it will take weeks to send it all from his office (in the old Battle School station now), but that at your end it will seem to arrive all at once. I hope it doesn't annoy your ship's captain too much — I understand it's a nobody, not Mazer Rackham after all — but what I'm sending goes with hegemony priority, which means he won't be able to read any of this and any messages HE'S expecting will have to wait. Give him my apologies. Or not, as you see fit.

I have never been so alone in my life. I wish for you every day. Fortunately, Father and Mother have turned out to be surprisingly useful. No, I should have said "helpful." But I'll leave the «useful» there so you can say, "He hasn't changed." They also miss you, and among the information you're getting are letters from both Father and Mother. Also letters from them to Ender. I hope the boy gets over the snit he's in and writes back to them. Missing you has given me some idea of how they feel about Ender (and now you): If he wrote to them it would mean the world. And what would it cost him?

No, I'm not going to write to him myself. I have no stock in that company. Mom and Dad are miserable, having only me as visible proof that they reproduced. Brighten their lives, both of you. What ELSE do you have to do? I picture you gliding along at lightspeed, with servants bringing you juleps and the fawning colonists begging Ender to tell them once again about how the formic home world went boom.

Writing this sometimes feels as if I'm talking to you like old times. But at this moment it's a painful reminder that it's nothing like talking to you at all.

As the official monster of the family, I hope you will compare me to a real monster like Achilles and give me some points for not being as awful as it is possible to be. I also have to tell you that I've learned that when no one else can be trusted — and I mean no one — there is family. And somehow I managed to be complicit in driving away two of the four people I could trust. Clumsy of me, n'est-ce pas?

I love you, Valentine. I wish I had treated you better from childhood on up. Ender too. Now, happy reading. The world is such a mess, you're glad you aren't here. But I promise you this: I will do all I can to put things back in order and bring peace. Without, I hope, waging too much war along the way.

With all my heart, your bratty brother,

Peter

Admiral Morgan kept Ender waiting outside his office for two full hours. It was exactly what Ender expected, however, so he closed his eyes and used the time to take a long, refreshing nap. He awoke to hear someone shouting from the other side of a door: "Well, wake him up and send him in, I'm ready!"

Ender sat up immediately, instantly aware of his surroundings. Even though he had never knowingly been in combat, he had acquired the military habit of remaining alert even when asleep. By the time the ensign whose duty was to waken him arrived, Ender was already standing up and smiling. "I understand it's time for my meeting with Admiral Morgan."

"Yes sir, if you please sir." The poor kid (well, six or seven years older than Ender, but still young to have an admiral yelling at him all day) was all over himself with eagerness to please Ender. So Ender made it a point to be visibly pleased. "He's in a temper," the ensign whispered.

"Let's see if I can cheer him up a little," said Ender.

"Not bloody likely," whispered the ensign. Then he had the door open. "Admiral Andrew Wiggin, sir." Ender stepped in as he was announced; the ensign beat a hasty retreat and shut the door behind him.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" demanded Admiral Morgan, his face livid. Since Ender had been napping for two hours, that meant either that Morgan had maintained his lividity throughout the interim, or he was able to switch it on at will, for effect. Ender was betting on the latter.

"I'm meeting with the captain of the ship, at his request."

"Sir," said Admiral Morgan.

"Oh, you don't need to call me sir," said Ender. "Andrew will do. I don't like to insist on the privileges of rank." Ender sat down in a comfortable chair beside Morgan's desk, instead of the stiff chair directly in front of it.

"On my ship you have no rank," said Morgan.

"I have no authority," said Ender. "But my rank travels with me."

"You are fomenting rebellion on my ship, coopting vital resources, subverting a mission whose primary purpose is to deliver you to the colony that you purport to be ready to govern."

"Rebellion? We're reading Taming of the Shrew, not Richard II."

"I'm still talking, boy! You may think you're heroism personified because you and your little chums played a videogame that turned out to be real, but I won't put up with this kind of subversion on my own ship! Whatever you did that made you famous and got you that ridiculous rank is over. You're in the real world now, and you're just a snot-nosed boy with delusions of grandeur."

Ender sat in silence, regarding him calmly.

"Now you can answer."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," said Ender.

Whereupon Morgan let fly with such a string of obscenities and vulgarities that it sounded like he had collected the favorite sayings of the entire fleet. If he had been red-faced before, he was purple now. And through it all, Ender struggled to figure out what it was about a play reading that had the man so insanely angry.

When Morgan paused for breath, leaning — no, slumping — on the desk, Ender rose to his feet. "I think you had better prepare the charges for my court martial, Admiral Morgan."

"Court martial! I'm not going to court-martial you, boy! I don't have to! I can have you put in stasis for the duration of the voyage on the authority of my signature alone!"

"Not a person of admiralty rank, I'm afraid," said Ender. "And it seems that formal charges in a court martial are the only way I'm going to get a coherent statement from you about what I have supposedly done to offend your dignity and cause such alarm."

"Oh, you want a formal statement? How about this: Hijacking all ansible communications for three hours so that we are effectively cut off from the rest of the known universe, how about that? Three hours means more than two days back in real time — for all I know there's been a revolution, or my orders have changed, or any number of things might be happening and I can't even send a message to inquire!"

"That's a problem, certainly," said Ender. "But why would you think I have anything to do with it?"

"Because it's got your name all over it," said Morgan. "The message is addressed to you. And it's still coming in, coopting our entire ansible bandwidth."

"Doesn't it occur to you," said Ender gently, "that the message is to me, not from me?"

" From Wiggin, to Wiggin, eyes only, so deeply encrypted that none of the shipboard computers can crack it."

"You tried to crack a secure communication addressed to a ranking officer, without first asking the permission of that officer?"

"It's a subversive communication, boy, that's why I tried to crack it!"

"You know it's subversive because you can't crack it, and you tried to crack it because you know it's subversive," said Ender. He kept his voice soft and cheerful. Not because he knew that it would drive Morgan crazy that Ender remained unflappable — that was just a bonus. He simply assumed that the entire exchange was being recorded to be used as evidence later, and Ender was not going to say a word or reveal an emotion that would not redound to his credit in some later court proceeding. So Morgan could be as abusive as he pleased — Ender was not going to make a single statement that could be excerpted and used to make him look subversive or angry.