Page 208 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

It was subtle. Ender couldn't see it for a long time. The bugger ships kept moving, all of them. There was no obvious flagship, no apparent nerve center. But gradually, as Mazer played the videos over and over again, Ender began to see the way that all the movements focused on, radiated from a center point. The center point shifted, but it was obvious, after he looked long enough, that the eyes of the fleet, the *I* of the fleet, the perspective from which all decisions were being made, was one particular ship. He pointed it out.
"You see it. I see it. That makes two people out of all of those who have seen this video. But it's true, isn't it."
"They make that ship move just like any other ship."
"They know it's their weak point."
"But you're right. That's the queen. But then you'd think that when you went for it, they would have immediately focused all their power on you. They could have blown you out of the sky."
"I know. That part I don't understand. Not that they didn't try to stop me -- they were firing at me. But it's as if they really couldn't believe, until it was too late, that I would actually kill the queen. Maybe in their world, queens are never killed, only captured, only checkmated. I did something they didn't think an enemy would ever do."
"And when she died vhe others all died,"
"No, they just went stupid. The first ships we boarded, the buggers were still alive. Organically. But they didn't move, didn't respond to anything, even when our scientists vivisected some of them to see if we could learn a few more things about buggers. After a while they all died. No will. There's nothing in those little bodies when the queen is gone."
"Why don't they believe you?" "Because we didn't find a queen." "She got blown to pieces."
"Fortunes of war. Biology takes second place to survival. But some of them are coming around to my way of thinking. You can't live in this place without the evidence staring you in the face."
"What evidence is there in Eros?"
"Ender, look around you. Human beings didn't carve this place. We like taller ceilings, for one thing. This was the buggers' advance post in the First Invasion. They carved this place out before we even knew they were here. We're living in a bugger hive. But we