An urchin is picked off the street by a nun and sent to war school to become a brilliant space-war strategist. He is Bean, so called because of his diminutive stature, the result of an illegal genetic experiment.

A hundred years before Ender's Game, humans thought they were alone in the galaxy. Humanity was slowly making their way out from Earth to the planets and asteroids of the Solar System, exploring and mining and founding colonies. The mining ship El Cavador is far out from Earth, in the deeps of the Kuiper Belt, beyond Pluto. Other mining ships, and the families that live on them, are few and far between this far out. So, when El Cavador's telescopes...