Ender tried to grasp the amounts of time that had gone by. "And the ships have been traveling for seventy years—"
"Some of them. And some for thirty years, and some for twenty. We make better ships now. We're learning how to play with space a little better. But every starship that is not still under construction is on its way to a bugger world or outpost. Every starship, with cruisers and fighters tucked into its belly, is out there approaching the buggers. Decelerating. Because they're almost there. The first ships we sent to the most distant objectives, the more recent ships to the closer ones. Our timing was pretty good. They'll all be arriving in combat range within a few months of each other. Unfortunately, our most primitive, outdated equipment will be attacking their homeworld. Still, they're armed well enough — we have some weapons the buggers never saw before."
Ender's Game - Chapter 13
And then the order came, the final mad assault on the planet's surface, the detonation of the M.D. device, the disintegration of the entire world.
Victory.
They celebrated. They drank. They wept for joy. They remembered all the people back on Earth that once upon a time they knew and loved, and wept again in grief. For by now they were all forty years older, and before this fleet could return eighty years would have gone by.
But they weren't going home. They had never planned to. Knowing what relativistic space travel would do to them, that they could never return to the lives they had once had, they set out on this expedition knowing that if they won, it would cease to be a military fleet and become, all at once, a colony.
They had expected to have to fight for control of the planet's surface, and it was to be a mission of extermination, like the one the Formics had launched against Earth. But after that last battle, it wasn't necessary. The queens of all the conquered worlds had been gathered together on the last planet. All their eggs in one basket, so to speak. When they died, the workers and larvae on all the worlds died with them. Not immediately, but within hours or days.
"The Goldbug" (short story)
Why should I be stuck now with decisions carelessly made twenty-four years ago? What I've written since is right; those contradictory but unimportant details in the original novel are wrong.
Therefore I have rewritten chapter 15 of Ender's Game, and at some future date there will be an edition of the novel that includes the revised chapter.
Ender in Exile - Afterword