Shadows in Flight, enhanced edition by Orson Scott Card Read Free Book Online

Ender. "Everything that's on the floor has been contaminated with that bacterial soup of decay. But larvae that cocooned themselves might still have clean genetic material I can study."
    "Not our highest priority," said Sergeant.
    "But not our lowest, either," said Ender. "We obviously have time to stop and chat. So let's collect a sample or two before we leave the Room of Goo."
    "You going to take a slug back? And the bacteria?" asked Sergeant.
    "Already collected samples of those on the way in."
    "You were supposed to be our rear guard, not a prancing naturalist," said Sergeant.
    "Nothing attacked us from behind," said Ender. "Hive Queens aren't the only ones who can multitask."
    "Boys," said Carlotta. "Is this how our whole lives are going to be? The two of you sniping at each other?"
    "Let's get one thing clear," said Ender. "Only one person has been sniping and it wasn't me. I've followed every order without complaint; I've criticized nothing. It's Sergeant who's determined to catch me doing something wrong. But I'm not. Carlotta said it -- the Hive Queens were expert geneticists, and they worked on their own genome to create the rabs. So what I collect here might teach us science that the human race hasn't developed on its own. It might save our lives."
    "And here's where you're both so stupid it hurts," said Carlotta. "The illusion in here is so good that it fooled you both."
    "What illusion?" asked Sergeant.
    "The illusion of gravity," said Carlotta.
    She watched in triumph as they realized: The cocoon wasn't going to drop when they cut it loose.
    "But the other cocoons fell," said Ender lamely.
    "During deceleration," said Carlotta. "The ship turned around and the rockets pushed upward to slow this big rock down. That's when the cocoons dropped."
    "But all this liquid," said Sergeant. "It clings to the floor."
    "It clings to the egg holes," said Carlotta. "It's not liquid, it's goo . Most of the voyage is in zero-gee. If the eggs and larvae need liquid to grow in, it has to be gelatinous so it stays put, or the Queen would be drowning in it."
    Ender was, of course, extrapolating. "The Hive Queen needs an environment just like home," he said. "On a planet, the liquid might just be water, the larvae would climb to the ceiling to make their cocoons. So they make this place look like that and function like that even without gravity."
    "Mags zero," said Sergeant. In a moment he was flying gently up to the nearest cocoon. With his laser pistol he deftly severed the stem, then floated back down holding the cocoon by that half of the stem.
    Ender shrank an expandable bag around the cocoon and put it into the sample pack. "Thanks," he said.
    "Now you'll try to baby that thing to keep from damaging it," said Sergeant. "Which means you won't be much help fighting."
    "Sergeant," said Carlotta, "he learned a lot from the exploded rab corpse you brought back in the Puppy; he can learn from the DNA in a crushed cocoon. So he's not going to baby it, he's going to do his job."
    "He was going to baby it," said Sergeant, "until you said that."
    Ender slapped his sample pack. Hard. "Eh," he said. "Andrew Delphiki, reporting for duty, sir."
    Sergeant couldn't help smiling. "Point taken. All right, Carlotta, where do you want to go?"
    "The thing I'm afraid of," said Carlotta, "is going out the wrong door and letting in a bunch of feral rabs. They'd go for the new slugs and make hash of the working rabs if they tried to interfere."
    "If we sedated them, then when they collide with this bacterial soup, I think they'll stick," said Ender. "If they don't drown, they'll dissolve."
    "We'll do as little damage as possible," said Sergeant, "but there's no point in leaving the way we came, because the tracks just loop back to the starting point."
    Carlotta agreed, but still had no advice about where to go. "The question is, will the helm be located at the hub, where it's equally distant from all the rockets and sensors, so all the controls and