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More laughter Bean flushed with anger

"It's plain we can't count on old ways of doing things," Ender said "So you'd better plan on battles anyti around with us, but I do like one thing--that I've got an army that can handle it"

After that, if he had asked them to follow him to the moon without space suits, they would have done it

Petra was not Cam Carby; she had more flexible patterns and responded , improvised, unpredictable attack As a result, Ender had three boys flashed and nine disabled at the end of the battle Petra was not gracious about bowing over his hand at the end, either The anger in her eyes seemed to say, I was your friend, and you humiliate me like this?

Ender pretended not to notice her fury He figured that after a few more battles, she'd realize that in fact she had scored ain And he was still learning from her In practice today he would teach his toon leaders how to counter the tricks Petra had played on theain

He hoped

At the end of the week Dragon Arht seven battles in seven days The score stood 7 wins and 0 losses Ender had never had more losses than in the battle with Phoenix Army, and in two battles he had suffered not one soldier frozen or disabled No one believed anys He had beaten top arer possible for the other conore hi to learn from him how he had defeated his most recent opponents He told them freely, confident that few of them would kno to train their soldiers and their toon leaders to duplicate what his could do And while Ender talked with a few coathered around the opponents Ender had defeated, trying to find out how Ender ht be beaten

There wereexcellent, for having made their victories look paltry and weak Ender saw it first in their faces when he passed thean to notice that soroup and move to another table if he sat near thean to be elbows that accidently jostled hiled with his when he walked into and out of the gym, spittle and wads of wet paper that struck hih the corridors They couldn't beat him in the battleroom, and knew it--so instead they would attack hiiant but just a little boy Ender despised them--but secretly, so secretly that he didn't even know it himself, he feared them It was just such little tor to feel far too much at home

These annoyances were petty, though, and Ender persuaded himself to accept theinning to imitate Ender Now most soldiers attacked with knees tucked under the up now, andthe walls None had caught on yet to Ender's five-toon organization--it gave hie that when they had accounted for thefor a fifth

Ender was teaching theo to learn new things?

He began to use the video rooreat commanders of the forces of hueneral practice an hour early, and allowed his toon leaders to conduct their own practice in his absence Usually they staged skirh to see that things were going well, then left to watch the old battles

Most of the vids were a waste of ti soldiers, confused shots of er installations But here and there he found useful sequences: ships, like points of light, hts on shipboard plotting screens, showing the whole of a battle It was hard, from the videos, to see all three dimensions, and the scenes were often short and unexplained But Ender began to see hoell the buggers used seeht paths to create confusion, how they used decoys and false retreats to draw the IF ships into traps Some battles had been cut into h the various videos; by watching them in sequence, Ender was able to reconstruct whole battles He began to see things that the official co to arouse pride in huan to wonder how huish; fleets responded to new circuer fleet seee instantly Of course, in the First Invasion the human ships were coer ships; it was only in the Second Invasion that the ships and weapons were swift and deadly

So it was froy He felt asha froly and ood at what they did To a point They always seereatest number of ships at the key point of conflict They never did anything surprising, anything that seemed

to show either brilliance or stupidity in a subordinate officer Discipline was apparently very tight

And there was one oddity There was plenty of talk about Mazer Rackham but precious little video of his actual battle Some scenes fro pathetic against the vast power of the ers had already beaten theout the earliest starships and y--that filony and terror of bugger victory Then the fleet co to Mazer Rackham's little force near Saturn, the hopeless odds, and then--