Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(30)

7

3. What are the most important problems the IF has been required to solve since the end of the Formic Wars?

There is no honest way to answer this question in the terms given, because it begs the question. We have no evidence, at least insofar as the public has been informed, that the Formic Wars are over.

We have seen the vids of the destruction of the presumptive Formic home world, and we have seen the vids of Formic warriors and workers collapsing and dying of their own accord, purportedly at the same moment that all the hive queens died on that home world.

However, since that planet is unable to provide us with an archaeological or fossil record demonstrating that it was the world on which the Formics evolved, this cannot be more than a supposition. Nor have we evidence that the inhabited worlds we invaded and seized were all the settled Formic worlds.

More to the point, it would be at least irresponsible and quite possibly insane to assume that the Formics did not have other colonizing expeditions underway at the time of Ender Wiggin’s glorious victory. The expedition that came to our solar system and was defeated finally by Mazer Rackham’s daring victory at the end of the Second Formic War had its own hive queen. Presumably other such expeditions would also have hive queens, and those hive queens would not have been destroyed when the “home world” smithereened.

Nor can we discount the possibility—or probability—that the Formics had launched a war fleet at least as terrible as our own, which cannot be detected yet because they are still traveling at a pace very close to lightspeed. We will only detect them when they decelerate.

So the biggest problem the IF had and has to deal with is the fact that most of the human race believes that the Formic threat has been completely extinguished, whereas we do not and cannot know that any such thing is true. We may be facing the most dire threat of all, potentially beginning at this instant or any other instant in the future. Since the Formics communicate mind to mind, they write nothing down. They make no maps. We cannot possibly have discovered their plans. It is insane for any student of military history to assume that because we have not detected an enemy fleet, it does not exist.

Yet even though we might face a savagely vengeful Formic armada at any moment, the government structures on Earth and Luna that provided funding and personnel for the International Fleet for half a century have now been allowed to lapse.

From this I believe we may conclude several things:

1.??The IF has conclusive evidence of the non-existence of any Formic war fleets or colonial expeditions, so the claimed certainty that no Formics remain alive anywhere is actually a certainty, or

2.??The IF has prepared such a massive and technologically advanced fleet, which now patrols the outskirts of the solar system, that no matter where a Formic armada assailed us, we could respond and give reliable protection to Earth, Luna, and all the important outposts of humanity in the solar system. This huge fleet is so capable that the Ministry of Colonization can make a great show of converting former warships into colonizing and exploratory ships in order to colonize the former Formic planets and discover new habitable planets where no Formic has ever been, or

3.??The IF has reason to believe that the Formics were not capable of any of these things. I can imagine the scenario like this: The hive queens were involved in a continuous civil war, competitive colonization like the European occupation and colonization of Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries. This savage warfare only ended just before the Formics sent out the colony that came to Earth to start the Formic Wars. Therefore this was the only expedition the Formics had launched.



Then, abashed at realizing, after Mazer Rackham’s victory in the Second Formic War, that humanity was indeed sentient and capable of besting them in war, they humbly decided to leave us alone and hoped that we would do the same. All their resources were devoted to creating defensive fleets around each of their inhabited worlds and, most especially, around their home world, and they gathered all the hive queens together on the home world in the belief that they could protect it against anything we might throw against it. Thus the Second and Third Formic Wars resulted in the destruction of every living hive queen, and there are no fleets or expeditions with their own hive queens wandering through our region of the galaxy.

I believe that if number one were true, conclusive evidence would have been broadcast by the government to every sentient being in the solar system. I feel confident in ruling it out.

If number two is believed by the IF high command, then our own successful invasion of the Formic planets and the destruction of their massively defended home world clearly demonstrates that anyone who thinks a Maginot Line cannot be penetrated or circumvented by the enemy is a fool doomed to destruction.

The only story that leads to our certain survival as a species is number three, and that depends on so much wishful thinking about Formic psychology, of which we know nothing, that I would rather believe in Santa Claus, since there is so much more evidence of his existence.

If I, as a child in school, can see these obvious points, then the finest minds of the International Fleet cannot have missed them. I affirm that the effort to colonize hitherto unknown worlds is the only plan with any chance of bringing about the survival of the human species. Therefore our Ministry of Colonization is the most important portion of the International Fleet, and the faster they can find habitable worlds and get colonies established, the better our chance of riding out the attempted obliteration of humanity by an enemy that has every reason to hate us forever.