A/N

Idea for this came from watching one of the film clip previews. Few liabilities taken (least as far as novel canon is concerned), but...well, suffice to say, this does indeed contain book spoilers.

Put on Ice

Gwen Anderson couldn't remember the last time she laughed.

Likely before assigned to Battle School, in hindsight, but even that felt like a different life entirely. A time where laughter was possible. A time where she didn't have to see children's lives be altered for the sake of humanity. To see those children depart, whether they washed out, be launched into the void to take part in an invasion dozens of light-years away, or if they were lucky, assigned to command positions within Sol itself.

Lucky!

Luck, she recalled, was almost as foreign a concept as laughter. Maybe it had been luck that had got Andrew "Ender" Wiggin into Battle School, but now, on Eros, luck was something that he didn't have to rely on. Luck wasn't playing into his manipulation of the International Fleet. If anything, it was the desire to win.

And I'd know. I gave him that desire.

She, and Graff, she reflected. But there'd be no shirking from responsibility if (or when) the time came for it, when historians could do its work without the threat of a bugger invasion hanging over them. All she could hope was that Wiggin's actions over the next few weeks would justify everything that had been done leading up to this point.

"Track them from below the ice and mirror their path."

Anderson and every other officer (the number of which had been steadily increasing over the last few days, she'd noticed) watched as the fleet approached the formic ships. Three of them, all deployed above the icy rings of a gas giant. Nameless ships defending a nameless planet, about to be engaged by human beings who certainly weren't nameless.

And Wiggin thinks, believes they are. That this is still a simulation. Christ!

"He's the one," she heard Graff say, as if reading her thoughts. For all she knew, the grizzled bastard could.

"Deploy all drones," she heard Wiggin say.

The display screen showed the fleet's fighters disengage to engage the formic ships, the buggers' own swarms deploying to meet their foes. The Ansible did its job well, she thought. Perhaps too well. Seeing a recording might have been easier, but this was occurring in real time. Right now, light-years away, men and women were fighting and dying. Though, as she noted, not as many as they might have otherwise. Because three of Wiggin's capital ships were moving to engage the buggers from below.

"He's gonna crush them," she heard Graff murmur.

Crush them. Obliterate them. Send thousands of buggers into the ether. To win the game, as far as the children believed.

"Now!" she heard Wiggin yell.

Sound didn't travel through space. Light did though. And the Ansible did its job even better. In real-time, she saw the ships open fire. In real-time, she saw the bugger ships explode into hundreds of pieces. In real-time, she saw their fighters lose all coordination. And in real-time, just a few metres away, she saw the children whoop and cheer. Level complete. Game on.

"I've never seen anyone do that," she murmured.

Do what? Engage buggers for the first time since the Second Invasion?

"Still think he's not ready?" she heard Graff ask.

Or celebrate the destruction of bugger ships not knowing that those ships were actually real?

"Well?"

"Of course Wiggin's ready," she said, turning to Graff. "That's what scares me."

"Ah, just focus on the enemy Major. At the least, the buggers were put…on ice."

Anderson stared. Graff remained stoic. The children continued to celebrate.

"On ice," she murmured. "Seriously?"

"You know me. I'm always serious."

Anderson wanted to say something. Something derogatory. Something to get all the guilt out of her. Something that would help her salvage her sense of morality when this was all over.

Instead she laughed. Graff smirked.

And it felt…good.