Page 605 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

"No one knows."
"The whole fleet?"
"Every ship."
"When you say they disappeared, what do you mean?"
Father glanced at her with a smile. "Well done, Qing-jao. You've asked the right question. No one saw them-- they were all in deep space. So they didn't physically disappear. As far as we know, they may be moving along, still on course. They only disappeared in the sense that we lost all contact with them. "
"The ansibles?"
"Silent. All within the same three-minute period. No transmissions were interrupted. One would end, and then the next one-- never came."
"Every ship's connection with every planetside ansible everywhere? That's impossible. Even an explosion-- if there could be one so large-- but it couldn't be a single event, anyway, because they were so widely distributed around Lusitania. "
"Well, it could be, Qing-jao. If you can imagine an event so cataclysmic-- it could be that Lusitania's star became a supernova. It would be decades before we saw the flash even on the closest worlds. The trouble is that it would be the most unlikely supernova in history. Not impossible, but unlikely."
"And there would have been some advance indications. Some changes in the star's condition. Didn't the ships' instruments detect something?"
"No. That's why we don't think it was any known astronomical phenomenon. Scientists can't think of anything to explain it. So we've tried investigating it as sabotage. We've searched for penetrations of the ansible computers. We've raked over all the personnel files from every ship, searching for some possible conspiracy among the shipboard crews. There's been cryptoanalysis of every communication by every ship, searching for some kind of messages among conspirators. The military and the government have analyzed everything they can think of to analyze. The police on every planet have conducted inquiries-- we've checked the background on every ansible operator."
"Even though no messages are being sent, are the ansibles still connected?"
"What do you think?"
Qing-jao blushed. "Of course they would be, even if an M.D. Device had been used against the fleet, because the ansibles are linked by fragments of subatomic particles. They'd still be there even if the whole starship were blown to dust."