Shadow of the Hegemon, the - Book 2 (Ender) by Orson Scott Card Read Free Book Online Page B

anybody put it together? Because the people who had the information were too dim to know what they had, and the people who could have understood it were locked in an apartment in an abandoned resort that even tourists didn't want to come to anymore.
    The worst thing was that even Mother and Father were getting on his nerves. After a childhood with no parents, the best thing that had ever happened to him was when Sister Carlotta's research found his biological parents. The war ended, and when all the other kids got to go home to their families, Bean wasn't left over. He got to go home to his family, too. He had no childhood memories of them, of course. But Nikolai had, and Nikolai let Bean borrow them as if they were his own.
    They were good people, his mother and his father. They never made him feel as if he were an intruder, a stranger, even a visitor. It was as if he had always belonged with them. They liked him. They loved him. It was a strange, exhilarating feeling to be with people who didn't want anything from you except your happiness, who were glad just to have you around.
    But when you're already going crazy from confinement, it doesn't matter how much you like somebody, how much you love them, how grateful you are for their kindness to you. They will make you nuts. Everything they do grates on you like a bad song that won't get out of your head. You just want to scream at them to shut. Up. But you don't, because you love them and you know that you're probably driving them crazy too and as long as there's no hope of release you've got to keep things calm ...
    And then finally there comes a knock on the door and you open it up and you realize that something different is finally going to happen.
    It was Colonel Graff and Sister Carlotta at the door. Graff in a suit now, and Sister Carlotta in an extravagant auburn wig that made her look really stupid but also kind of pretty. The whole family recognized them at once, except that Nikolai had never met Sister Carlotta. But when Bean and his family got up to greet them, Graff held up a hand to stop them and Carlotta put her finger to her lips. They came inside and closed the door after them and beckoned the family to gather in the bathroom.
    It was a tight fit, the six of them in there. Father and Mother ended up standing in the shower while Graff hung a tiny machine from the overhead light. Once it was in place and the red light began blinking, Graff spoke softly.
    "Hi," he said. "We came to get you out of this place."
    "Why all the precautions in here?" asked Father.
    "Because part of the security system here is to listen in on everything said in this apartment."
    "To protect us, they spy on us?" asked Mother.
    "Of course they do," said Father.
    "Since anything we say here might leak into the system," said Graff, "and would most certainly leak right back out of the system, I brought this little machine, which hears every sound we make and produces countersounds that nullify them so we pretty much can't be heard."
    "Pretty much?" asked Bean.
    "That's why we won't go into any details," said Graff. "I'll tell you only this much. I'm the minister of Colonization, and we have a ship that leaves in a few months. Just time enough to get you off Earth, up to the ISL, and over to Eros for the launch."
    But even as he said it, he was shaking his head, and Sister Carlotta was grinning and shaking her head, too, so that they would know that this was all a lie. A cover story.
    "Bean and I have been in space before, Mother," said Nikolai, playing along. "It's not so bad."
    "It's what we fought the war for," Bean chimed in. "The Formics wanted Earth because it was just like the worlds they already lived on. So now that they're gone, we get their worlds, which should be good for us. It's only fair, don't you think?"
    Of course their parents both understood what was happening, but Bean knew Mother well enough by now that he wasn't surprised that she had to ask a completely useless and