Fleet Admiral Sandra Crandall had never been a good woman to disappoint. She was a big woman, with a hard, determined face and what one thankfully anonymous subordinate had once described as the disposition of a grizzly bear with hemorrhoids trying to pass pinecones. In fact, Commander Hago Shavarshyan thought, that had been a gross libel against grizzly bears.
Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but there’s no story here. The lights were ball lightning.
There! Are! Four! Lights!
I am Number Four.
This one word: “I”.
It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course, the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word, which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good,’ for instance. If you have a word like ‘good,’ what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well – better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good,’ what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words – in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston?
I must admit, I admire the way you do things.
Take two aspirin and call me in the morning. That’s a doctor joke.
Security, Lieutenant Riley is on his way to sick bay. See to it he arrives.
Knowing humans as thou dost, Captain, wouldst thou be captured helpless by them? Now go back, or thou shalt most certainly die.
Then you should have died!
“If you go to Z’ha’dum, you will die.”
To the bridge of Khazad Dum!
Let me try to pump some morale into them.
“We lost Trevor’s Star because the Manties have better ships and their technology is still better than ours. And because—thanks in no small part to our own policy of shooting losing admirals—their senior officers go right on accruing experience while ours keep suffering from a severe case of being dead.”
“This is Admiral John Simpson, United States Navy,” the hugely amplified voice continued, this time in recognizable German. “Lower your sails and surrender, or I will be forced to fire into you!”
No! Never give up, never surrender!
DD: John Chandler Simpson is one of my favorite characters.
In play:
It was probably bad form for an admiral to sail into battle already prepared to hoist the signal ordering his command to scatter and run, but Aage Overgaard intended to get no more people killed than he had to. He would carry out his orders to test the combat capabilities of the new warships, and then—
And then, he thought grimly, I’ll run like hell.
“And you’d just run?”
“Forthrightly and without shame.”
“Lennier, get us the hell out of here.”
“Initiating “getting the hell out of here” maneuver.”