Ender's Shadow

words Ender said in their first day of training as Dragon Army: Remember, the enemy's gate is down. In Dragon Army's last battle, when there was no hope, that was the strategy that Ender had used, sending Bean's squad to press their helmets against the floor around the gate and win. Too bad there was no such cheat available now.
      Deploying Dr. Device against the planet's surface to blow the whole thing up, that might do the trick. You just couldn't get there from here.
      It was time to give up. Time to get out of the game, to tell them not to send children to do grownups' work. It's hopeless. We're done.
      "Remember," Bean said ironically, "the enemy's gate is down.”
      Fly Molo, Hot Soup, Vlad, Dumper, Crazy Tom -- they grimly laughed. They had been in Dragon Army. They remembered how those words were used before.
      But Ender didn't seem to get the joke.
      Ender didn't seem to understand that there was no way to get Dr. Device to the planet's surface.
      Instead, his voice came into their ears, giving them orders. He pulled them into a tight formation, cylinders within cylinders.
      Bean wanted to shout, Don't do it! There are real men on those ships, and if you send them in, they'll die, a sacrifice with no hope of victory.
      But he held his tongue, because, in the back of his mind, in the deepest corner of his heart, he still had hope that Ender might do what could not be done. And as long as there was such a hope, the lives of those men were, by their own choice when they set out on this expedition, expendable.
      Ender set them in motion, having them dodge here and there through the ever-shifting formations of the enemy swarm.
      Surely the enemy sees what we're doing, thought Bean. Surely they see how every third or fourth move takes us closer and closer to the planet.
      At any moment the enemy could destroy them quickly by concentrating their forces. So why weren't they doing it?
      One possibility occurred to Bean. The Buggers didn't dare concentrate their forces close to Ender's tight formation, because the moment they drew their ships that close together, Ender could use Dr. Device against them.
      And then he thought of another explanation. Could it be that there were simply too many Bugger ships? Could it be that the queen or queens had to spend all their concentration, all their mental strength just keeping ten thousand ships swarming through space without getting too close to each other?
      Unlike Ender, the Bugger queen couldn't turn control of her ships over to subordinates. She had no subordinates. The individual Buggers; were like her hands and her feet. Now she had hundreds of hands and feet, or perhaps thousands of them, all wiggling at once.
      That's why she wasn't responding intelligently. Her forces were too numerous. That's why she wasn't making the obvious moves, setting traps, blocking Ender from taking his cylinder ever closer to the planet with every swing and dodge and shift that he made.
      In fact, the maneuvers the Buggers were making were ludicrously wrong. For as Ender penetrated deeper and deeper into the planet's gravity well, the Buggers were building up a thick wall of forces behind Ender's formation.
      They're blocking our retreat!
      At once Bean understood a third and most important reason for what was happening. The Buggers had learned the wrong lessons from the previous battles. Up to now, Ender's strategy had always been to ensure the survival of as many human ships as possible. He had always left himself a line of retreat. The Buggers, with their huge numerical advantage, were finally in a position to guarantee that the human forces would not get away.
      There was no way, at the beginning of this battle, to predict that the Buggers would make such a mistake. Yet throughout history, great victories had come as much because of the losing army's errors as because of the winner's brilliance in battle. The Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life. We don't throw our forces away because every soldier is the queen of a one-member hive. But they've learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong -- for we humans do , when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow