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But it soon became clear to Ender, as he sat and watched the battle from the corridor, that they did not kno to handle the stars They did kno to softland on one and use it for cover, the tactics of assaulting the enemy's position on a star They showed no sense at all of which starsstars that could have been bypassed by wallsliding to a more advanced position

The other coy Condor Army forced the Salamanders into costly assaults Fewer and fewer Salamanders were unfrozen for the attack on the next star It was clear, after only four minutes, that Sala

Ender stepped through the gate He drifted slightly doard The battlerooms he had practiced in always had their doors at floor level For real battles, however, the door was set in the

Abruptly he felt himself reorient, as he had in the shuttle What had been doas now up, and now sideways In nullo, there was no reason to stay oriented the way he had been in the corridor It was i at the perfectly square doors, which way had been up And it didn't matter For now Ender had found the orientation that ame was to fall toward the enemy's home

Ender made the motions that oriented hi spread out, his whole body presented to the enes pointed toward theet

So ais up under his of his suit froze in position His arms remained unfrozen, for without a direct body hit, only the limbs that were shot froze up It occurred to Ender that if he had not been presenting his legs to the enemy, it would have been his body they hit He would have been immobilized

Since Bonzo had ordered hi his head or arnored hi at theave ground stubbornly The battle disintegrated into a dozen individual shootouts Bonzo's discipline paid off now, for each Salamander that froze took at least one enemy with him No one ran or panicked, everyone remained calm and aimed carefully

Petra was especially deadly Condor Arreat effort to freeze her They froze her shooting arm first, and her stream of curses was only interrupted when they froze her completely and the helmet clamped down on her jaw In a few minutes it was over Salamander Army offered no more resistance

Ender noted with pleasure that Condor could only ate to victory Four of thehted spots at the four corners of Salah the forcefield That ended the gahtness, and Anderson came out of the teacher door

I could have drawn ht Ender, as the eneun and shot just one of theame would have been a draw Without four h the gate, Condor would have had no victory Bonzo, you ass, I could have saved you from this defeat Maybe even turned it to victory, since they were sitting there, easy targets, and they wouldn't have known at first where the shots were coh shot for that

But orders were orders, and Ender had proet some satisfaction out of the fact that on the official tally Salamander Army recorded, not the expected forty-one disabled or elied Bonzo couldn't understand it, until he consulted Anderson's book and realized who it was I was only daht Ender I could still shoot

He expected Bonzo to come to him and say, "Next time, when it's like that, you can shoot" But Bonzo didn't say anything to hi after breakfast Of course, Bonzo ate in the commanders' mess, but Ender was pretty sure the odd score would cause as much st

ir there as it did in the soldiers' dining hall In every other ga team was either eliminated--totally frozen--or disabled, which meant they had some body parts still unfrozen, but were unable to shoot or inflict da arory

Ender volunteered no explanation, but the other members of Salamander Army let it be knohy it had happened And when other boys asked him why he hadn't disobeyed orders and fired, he calmly answered, "I obey orders"

After breakfast, Bonzo looked for hiet it"