Why was the Bugger Queens of Second Invasion so close (in Solar System)?

Question

According to Ender Canon, Mazer Rakham won a Second Formics Invasion by figuring out the pattern and finding and destroying the Bugger Queen's ship.

But as we find out later:

• Formics' Queens can communicate with the "worker" buggers via philotic connections

• This communication is instantaneous across any distance.

So, given this:

why was the invasion-commanding bugger Queen situated right there in Solar System where she could be destroyed in the first place?

I'd prefer an in-universe answer or at least an authoritative (e.g. from OSC) one, not a speculation.

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UPDATE: Please note that "The Formics didn't realize that the queen was in any danger and thus needed to be protected" seems to be 100% wrong according to "Ender's Game":

Ender : "They make that ship move just like any other ship";

Mazer : "They know it's their weak point."

Answer 1

I don't have the text with me right now, but one of the Enderverse books does mention it.

Anyway, the First Invasion didn't have a queen because, as you noted, it doesn't actually need to be close to its buggers. It was an exploratory fleet that discovered Earth and, while wiped out in the process, noticed that Earth was a pretty nice planet and if they just brought some more buggers along, it'd make a pretty nice colony.

So the Second Invasion comes along, and this one is a colony fleet (with appropriate ships designed for killing all the humans). Now, the buggers had never met intelligent life before, so they assumed that (1) it didn't really matter that they were killing individual humans, because the "queen" wasn't dying and (2) furthermore, because of that, the humans would obey the same rules of combat as the buggers (i.e. not kill queens).

Quote from Mazer in support of (2):

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.

So, according to Mazer, the buggers were under the impression that they weren't in danger from the humans anyway. In the sense that they didn't think it was possible for a queen to be deliberately killed.

Therefore, It didn't make sense to them to have the queen wait until all humanity was completely destroyed before coming along when she could just come with the rest of the fleet.

Answer 2

The point of the "first invasion" was to search for a place to plant a colony. A process that was known to be risky.

The point of the second invasion was to plant a new colony. The queen aboard was near maturity, and needed a place to build a colony; had she not gone with, she'd have been too old by the time the colony space was secured, and would have had no real place to plant a viable colony at home.

The queen aboard was personally in charge of the colonial fleet; the other queens do not actually cooperate as much as avoid each other's efforts. Once the Young Queen was able to assert her control over the invasion forces, the invasion was, for all intents of the others, her problem alone. They supported her in as much as her success would have opened a new system up for other young queens to be sent.

Answer 3

The Buggers communicate instantly, but they do not travel instantly. It's a long voyage to earth and the point was to establish her colony. It was the queens tactic to keep her fleet at full strength, and to do that she chose not to subtract her ship from the fleet.

Mazer states that without killing the queen, humans were losing; but he states that he thinks it could have been relatively close - I think it was a loss of 2 to 3 that he states. No doubt he was brilliant, but others expected humans to lose by a wider margin, probably including the queen.

Nothing ever said that the queen was housed on Eros or anything besides this ship. It stands to reason that she had nowhere else to go besides her ship. Considering other life not intelligent is different from considering them not a threat.

She blended in because humans are dangerous and needed 100% of her fleet in order to have the best odds. Yet she didn't want their weakness to be obvious. That's good strategy. Removing a ship from a battle that you have a chance to lose is bad strategy. However, Mazer saw through it and defeated them. The buggers learn and will never expose such a weakness again.

Answer 4

First of all the Queen was present in the second invasion because the Formics wanted to setup a colony. Part of setting up the colony would be defending it from other invaders. Since the Queen is the only way to replenish the troop supply after the battle it makes sense that one would be handy. Otherwise the invasion force would have to large enough to wipe out the hostile lifeforms on Earth, and resist any incursions until the queen arrived.

Secondly, I disagree with the existing theories/interpretations on the movements of the queen and the disbelief that Mazer noticed. The formics obviously knew Earthlings had offensive capabilities because we defeated the First Invasion. As such it is prudent to camouflage their Queen. IMO this was mostly because the Queen's ability to immediately replenish the troop supply gives the new colony a better chance at success. Furthermore, it is always a good idea to execute military operations in a good military fashion.

The reason why the Queen shows shock/disbelief¹ at Mazer's actions is because Mazer's actions showed that Earthlings had truly intelligent life. The Formics didn't really think any Earthlings had truly intelligent life. An analogy would be us wiping out an anthill. We know ants build cities, but we don't view them as equals. As such most humans aren't concerned with massacring ants. Imagine you were spraying an ant hill with poison and you see ants donning chemical suits and start launching barbs directly at the pupil of your eye. You would try to stop them but you're disbelief would affect your ability to act decisively. Mazer demonstrated his ability to analyze the movements of the formation, identify an anomaly, and perform a surgical strike to capitalize on that anomaly/weakness.

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1: Manifested through the actions of the drones.

Answer 5

Obviously, the Queen should be fairly close to the attacking force, in order to establish a colony as soon as possible. Leaving her several light years away would be impractical.

This leaves two options: have the Queen's ship inside the main force, or keep it slightly to the distance: say, somewhere inside Kuiper belt. However, the buggers knew nothing of human monitoring capabilities. For all they knew, humans might detect a small fleet in the distance, guess its purpose and capture the Queen without battling the main force. If the Queens could have a vague feeling of each other's position, the idea of splitting forces would seem even more dangerous.

Answer 6

The Queen was in the solar system because they honestly did not think that she would be killed. They had no way to listen to our television/ radio signals so they assumed Earth was empty. The queen would start producing more formics and a new queen to replace her before she became too old.

So to make it short the only reason the queen needed to be close to Earth was to land on the surface and create more Formics and a new queen. That's all.

Then they would send more ships and queens once all the infrastructure was set-up.

Answer 7

Maybe it was because the queen needed to be close enough to the battle to actually be able to see what was going on. The queens can communicate their intentions instantly to their workers, but maybe not vice-versa.

OSC says that the workers were more like appendiges of the queen than subordinates. He said they could transmit thoughts, but never said they could relay what their eyes were seeing.

So they could have had no observations/updates of their own to report back

or

thoughts/observations alone would not have provided enough rapidly changing tactical info.

Thus, the queen had to be able to see what was going on herself, or the workers had no such thoughts in the first place.