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"I'm not hungry." His voice was muffled by the door. "Go on and eat."
"We can wait," said Fly. "Don't want you walking to the commanders' mess alone." "I'm not going to eat any lunch at all," said Ender. "Go on and I'll see you after." "You heard him," said Fly to the others. "He'll be safe in here while we eat."
Bean had noticed that Ender did not promise to stay in his room throughout lunch. But at least Bonzo's people wouldn't know where he was. Unpredictability was helpful. And Bean wanted to get the chance to make his speech at lunch.
So he ran to the messroom and did not get in line, but instead bounded up onto a table and clapped his hands loudly to get attention. "Hey, everybody!"
He waited until the group went about as close to silent as it was going to get.
"There's some of you here who need a reminder of a couple of points of I.F. law. If a soldier is ordered to do something illegal or improper by his commanding officer, he has a responsibility to refuse the order and report it. A soldier who obeys an illegal or improper order is fully responsible for the consequences of his actions. Just in case any of you here are too dim to know what that means, the law says that if some commander orders you to commit a crime, that's no excuse. You are forbidden to obey."
Nobody from Salamander would meet Bean's gaze, but a thug in Rat uniform answered in a surly tone. "You got something in mind, here, pinprick?"
"I've got *you* in mind, Lighter. Your scores are pretty much in the bottom ten percent in the school, so I thought you might need a little extra help."
"You can shut your facehole right now, that's the help I need!"
"Whatever Bonzo had you set to do last night, Lighter, you and about twenty others, what I'm telling you is *if* you'd actually tried something, every single one of you would have been out of Battle School on his ass. Iced. A complete failure, because you listened to Bonehead Madrid. Can I be any more clear than that?"
Lighter laughed -- it sounded forced, but then, he wasn't the only one laughing. "You don't even know what's going on, pinprick," one of them said.
"I know Bonehead's trying to turn you into a street crew, you pathetic losers. He can't beat Ender in the battleroom, so he's going to get a dozen tough guys to beat up one little kid. You all hear that? You know what Ender is -- the best damn commander ever to come through here. He might be the only one able to do what Mazer Rackham did and beat the Buggers when they come back, did you think of that? And these guys are so *smart* they want to beat his brains out. So when the Buggers come, and we've only got pus-brains like Bonzo Madrid to lead our fleets to defeat, then as