It'd been twenty years since the formic wars were won. Peter Wiggin was the undisputed leader of our world and Demosthenes, Ender and many other important thinkers had left to colonize other worlds. However, the Hegemon was not stupid, he had never been so and he knew that without an army his hegemony would die with him.

That is why the battle school was re-opened. I'm not going to lie, part of the reason I went was because the Americans would freak if it was all Easterners. But I went none the less. There are something like 20 intergalactic space stations on Earth and naturally I went on the one in New York.

The Hegemon didn't wait for us personally because he has other work in the capital but there was a hologram of him on the ship.

"Hello boys and girls, please prepare for takeoff. As I'm sure you know already the battle school is being re-opened. As such you and the ships from the other stations are the first group to get to the school. This school has a lot of historical importance. Without it we would almost definitely have lost the Second Formic War." I have to admit I was unimpressed by his speech. Historical importance? Every single commander in the entire war had come out of the Battle School!

"Do any of you have questions?" Asked Peter.

"Is it true about you and Petra?" a voice asked from somewhere in the middle of the ship.

Immediately the adults on board scoured the room with angry glares looking for the culprit.

The Hegemon just smiled "Even Locke has the right to remain silent, though I will admit that I rarely use it." Despite being only about 35 the Hegemon had a sort of grandfather like atmosphere around him that somehow made it okay that a world leader was joking with nine year olds.

A few other kids asked some stupid questions and I started to look around. I was eight and almost everyone else was nine or ten. Looking back at it that sounds stupid but at the time it presented a serious problem. I wanted to be a leader not everyone's little brother.

"My name's Dan, what's yours?" I asked the boy sitting next to me. He was small like me and hadn't done anything to arouse anger or resent.

"Spike." He said

"What kind of a name is that?" asked the girl behind him

"I'm small but I surprise people when I'm pissed" Spike said turning. "Kind of like Bean"

"You sayin you're gonna grow eight feet tall and put the Hegemon in office?" The girl asked with a smile

"Hey you asked" Spike said.

"What do you think is up there?" I asked

"The Battle School." The girl said

"No I mean past that, they didn't do this for fun, they must think there's another war or something or else they wouldn't have re-opened" I explained.

"Oh I don't know, maybe Ender didn't manage to kill all them buggers" The girl said

"No." Said the bigger boy on my left, he was probably about ten. "Cause otherwise they wouldn't ever have shut it down."

We continued to argue but the truth was that we had no idea what we were talking about. The main thing was that we were talking and while other kids felt scared and alone we had a gang already.

Once we got to the Battle School we walked to the dining hall. It was huge. I don't mean big for a space shuttle, I just mean flat out giant. The one at my school could fit inside it 10 times over easily.

"Welcome to the Battle School. We are going to have an all school practice for the first week and you will all sleep here in the dining hall. Once we have assessed you we will split you up into groups. During the bugger wars our school was much smaller due to funding issues, however due to new scientific development our school has expanded drastically. We will have armies of 100 students. This first year we will have 8 armies but we plan to expand in the future."

The headmaster continued to ramble on and on but I was busy playing with my chicken trying to figure out if it was real or not to pay much attention.

Soon after dinner we went to battle room. It was no larger than I had imagined it to be but now it had 800 kids in it. Of course, we all new about the way the games worked so we shot anyone and everyone we saw.

My group of friends were clumped on the side with me because the air space was already far too cramped. Any kind of movement would most likely result in hitting into the wrong wall harder than anticipated.

I thought for a second "Hey guys, let's make a sphere"

"What do you mean?" asked the larger boy who had sat next to me. His name was Tommy.

"If we get like twenty kids together and make a globe kind of thing we can probably go crashing through this whole group."

"What do you mean?" asked Spike.

I started moving kids from place to place while I had Tommy hold us in place using the railing. Soon others started to climb next to us. We soon had a makeshift blob thing made up. There were about 30 or so kids in it and I climbed over as carefully as I could to the wall.

"Okay! On the count of three lets push off to the opposite side of the wall!" All the kids held onto each other and braced themselves "One, Two, Three!" We pushed off and went flying forward far faster than was safe or expected. We hit into about 40 kids as we crossed and we grabbed some 10 or so and they joined in with us.

Finally we reached the other side. 'Sweet!' 'Awesome' 'Let's do that again' was the general consensus.

"Guys! Let's see if we can join together in the middle!" I said "Spike, take that lot that way and all take these guys over here."

A couple of kids murmured something along the lines of 'who put you in charge shorty?' but most listened.

"OKAY GUYS!" I had to yell to be heard over the noise of 800 kids crashing into one another in null gravity "EVERYONE WITH ME GO TO THE OPPOSITE WALL AND EVERYONE WITH SPIKE GO TO THAT ONE OPPOSITE YOU WHEN WE HIT INTO EACH OTHER GRAB ON TO THE PEOPLE WITH YOU AND LETS SEE IF WE CAN GET TO THAT CORNER THERE!" I stopped to catch my breath and let everyone assemble "ONE, TWO, THREE!"

We leapt off our side as did the opposite group. It wasn't pretty but we crashed into one another and only lost about a third of each group when we sailed to the corner. However, our landing was not even close to as harmonious, it was a mumble jumble of arms and legs that if it weren't for null gravity would almost definitely have killed someone. However, with our suits and the help of Null-G no one was seriously injured.