AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He was assigned a bunk at the far end of the room. The upper bunk, so that when he lay on his bed he couldn't even see the door: The curve of the ceiling blocked it. There were other boys near him, tired-looking boys, sullen, the ones least valued. They had nothing of welcome to say to Ender.
Ender tried to palm his locker open, but nothing happened. Then he realized the lockers were not secured. All four of them had rings on them, to pull them open. Nothing would be private, then, now that he was in an army.
There was a uniform in the locker. Not the pale green of the Launchies, but the orange-trimmed dark green of Salamander Army. It did not fit well. But then, they had probably never had to provide such a uniform for a boy so young.
He was starting to take it off when he noticed Petra walking down the aisle toward his bed. He slid off the bunk and stood on the floor to greet her.
"Relax," she said. "I'm not an officer."
"You're a toon leader, aren't you?"
Someone nearby snickered.
"Whatever gave you that idea, Wiggin?"
"You have a bunk in the front."
"I bunk in the front because I'm the best sharpshooter in Salamander Army, and because Bonzo is afraid I'll start a revolution if the toon leaders don't keep an eye on me. As if I could start anything with boys like these." She indicated the sullen-faced boys on the nearby bunks.
What was she trying to do, make it worse than it already was? "Everybody's better than I am," Ender said, trying to dissociate himself from her contempt for the boys who would, after all, be his near bunkmates.
"I'm a girl," she said, "and you're a pissant of a six-year-old. We have so much in common, why don't we be friends?"
"I won't do your deskwork for you," he said.
In a moment she realized it was a joke. "Ha," she said. "It's all so military, when you're in the game. School for us isn't like it is for Launchies. History and strategy and tactics and buggers and math and stars, things you'll need as a pilot or a commander. You'll see."
"So you're my friend. Do I get a prize?" Ender asked. He was imitating her swaggering way of speaking, as if she cared about nothing.
"Bonzo isn't going to let you practice. He's going to make you take your desk to the battleroom and study. He's right, in a way--he don't want a totally untrained little kid to screw up his precision maneuvers." She lapsed into giria, the slangy talk that imitated the pidgin English of uneducated people. "Bonzo, he pre-dse. He so careful, he piss on a plate and never splash."
Ender grinned.
"The battleroom is open all the time. If you want, I'll take you in the off hours and show you some of the things I know. I'm not a great soldier, but I'm pretty good, and I sure know more than you."
"If you want," Ender said.
"Starting tomorrow morning after breakfast."
"What if somebody's using the room? We always went right after breakfast, in my launch."
"No problem. There are really nine battlerooms."
"I never heard of any others."
"They all have the same entrance. The whole center of the battle school, the hub of the wheel, is battlerooms. They don't rotate with the rest of the station. That's how they do the nullo, the no-gravity--it just holds still. No spin, no down. But they can set it up so that any one of the rooms is at the battleroom entrance corridor that we all use. Once you're inside, they move it along and another battleroom's in position."
"Oh."
"Like I said. Right after breakfast."
"Right," Ender said.
She started to walk away.
"Petra," he said.
She turned back.
