"No. Because the formic anti-grav--technically, anti-inertial--was on. Powered by the egg reaction, too, of course. It's like all the molecules in space were put there to be cheap fuel for our ships and everything on them. Anyway, the anti-gravs compensated for the jump and the only problem was communicating with IFCom to tell them what happened. Without the cruiser, no communications except short-range radio."
The captain went on to tell about the clever way the men on the formic ship attracted the attention of rescuers, but Ender's concentration was on something else--something so disturbing that it made him lightheaded and a little nauseated from the shock of it.
The egg, the strong force field generator, obviously was the source of the molecular disruption device. What the captain had just described was the reaction that was in the M.D. Device, the "Little Doctor," which Ender had used to destroy the formic home planet and kill all the hive queens.
Ender thought it was a technology that humans had come up with on their own. But it was clearly based on formic technology. You just take away the controls that shape the field, and you've got a field that chews up everything in its path and spits it out as raw atoms. A field that sustains itself on the energy it generates by playing with the strong nuclear force. A planet-eater.
The formics had to recognize it when Ender used it the first time. It wasn't mysterious to them--they'd recognize it immediately as a raw, uncontrolled weaponization of the principle that powered every formic starship.
Between the time of that battle and the final one, the formics surely had the time to do the same thing--to weaponize the strong force field generator and use it against the humans before they came in range.
They absolutely knew what the weapon was. They could have made their own whenever they wanted. But they didn't do it. They just sat there waiting for Ender.
They gave us the stardrive we used to get to them, and the weapon we used to kill them. They gave us everything.
We humans are supposed to be so clever. So inventive. Yet this was completely beyond our reach. We make desks with clever holodisplays that we can play really fun games on. Plus send each other letters over vast distances. But compared to them, we didn't even know how to kill properly. While they knew how--but chose not to use the technology that way.
"Well, this part of the tour usually bores people," said the captain.
"No, I wasn't bored. Truly. I was just thinking."
"About what?"
"Stuff that's too classified to talk about using any method but telepathy," said Ender. Which was true--the existence of the M.D. Device was only on a need-to-know basis, and the secret had been well kept. Even the men who deployed and used the weapons didn't understand what they were and what they could do. The soldiers who had seen the Little Doctor consume a planet were dead, lost in the same vast chain reaction. The soldiers who had seen it used in one of the early battles just thought of it as an incredibly big bomb. Only the top brass understood it--and Ender, because Mazer Rackham had insisted that he had to be told what the weapons he carried actually were and how they worked. As Mazer told him later, "I told Graff, You don't give a man a bag of tools and not tell him what they are and what they do and how they might go wrong."
Graff again. Graff who decided Mazer was right and allowed them to tell Ender what it was and how it worked.
My slaughter of the formics--it's all here in the egg.
"You've gone off again," said the captain.
"Thinking about what a miracle starflight is. Whatever else we might think of the buggers, they did give us our road to the stars."
"I know," said the captain. "I've thought of that before. If they had just bypassed our system instead of coming in and trying to wipe Earth clean, we'd never have known they existed. And at our level of technology, we probably wouldn't have gotten out into the stars until so much later that we'd have found every nearby planet completely occupied by formics."
"Captain, this was a most excellent and productive tour."
"I know. How else would you have learned how to find the head on every deck?"
Ender laughed at the joke. Partly because it was true. He'd need to find a bathroom several times a day through the whole voyage.
"I assume you're staying awake for the flight," said the captain.
"Wouldn't want to miss any of the scenery."
"Oh, there's no scenery, because at lightspeed you--oh, a joke. Sorry, sir."
"Got to work on my sense of humor, when my jokes make other people apologize to me."
"Begging your pardon, sir, but you don't talk like a kid."
"Do I talk like an admiral?" asked Ender.
"Since you are an admiral, however you talk is like an admiral, sir," said the captain.
"Very cleverly sidestepped, sir. Tell me, are you coming on the voyage with me?"
"I have a family on Earth, sir, and my wife doesn't want to join a colony on another world. No pioneer spirit, I'm afraid."