I need to stop getting into situations where all my options are potentially bad.
Maxim 42: “They’ll never expect this” means “I want to try something stupid.”
I get it. I didn’t go to your stupid S.H.I.E.L.D. Hogwarts or whatever.
See that? NYPD, means I will Knock Your Punkass Down!
“Before you go any further, pal, I gotta tell ya it’s cash up front. A thousand bucks a day for a full investigation, another thou’ if the assailant is caught. Do you understand?”
“Yeah. Hey, here’s a dollar. Thanks for nothin’.”
“Think you can do better?.. Punk.”
" ‘Reasonably straight’? I hope you won’t mind if I say that sounds just a bit casual for someone worth thirty or forty billion dollars, Honor!"
“It’s only about twenty-nine billion”
And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.
Well, I’d certainly say she had marvelous judgment, Albert… if not particularly good taste.
Keepiru watched and listened as the battle began to subside. A strange sadness filled him, as if he almost regretted the end.
- I told you—I would feed you *
He sang softly to the dying creature below.
- But I did not say who—I would feed you to … *
“It’s all a part of this nutritious war.”
“No spaghetti,” she said sternly. A mother, even one who spent so much time in space, had to draw the line somewhere, she figured. “Peas.”
*
“’paghetti!”*
“Peas!”
She sat back, crossing her arms, and regarded him with a frosty maternal eye.
“You do realize they can sense fear, don’t you?” Hamish asked helpfully.
“You so do not want to go there, Hamish Erwin MacGregor Simpson Alexander-Harrington,” she told him ominously, never looking away from their son.
We are hanging in space, and standing on the ceiling, swirling at light speed forward and backward at once and spaghettified by the black hole mass of it.
Remember the Finagle Laws. The perversity of the universe tends toward a maximum. The universe is hostile.
“I’m dark matter. The universe inside of me is full of something, and science can’t even shine a light on it. I feel like I’m mostly made of mysteries.”
A battle rages at the core of our galaxy. The immense swarm of Dark Matter Paan’uri outnumbers and out-masses the ships of the Fleetmind by enough orders of magnitude that you’d think “magnitude” was something your busload of collegiate Armorball players could order at Tacobufa on the way to the game.
Captain’s log. Stardate: The Year of the Tiger. The battle has been bravely fought, and the suffering of our troops, beyond measure. But the alien is invulnerable, and our defeat: inevitable. That much is certain, even from my remote command post here at the Times Square Applebee’s.
She’d deliberately broken the screening units down into their own point defense nets, independent of her SDs and freed of any responsibility for covering her wall. Combined with their more effective decoys and jammers, that tremendously degraded the accuracy of the fire directed upon them.
Which meant that “only” six of her nineteen battlecruisers—and fifteen thousand of her people—died in the first broadside.
She stared at her plot, her face a mask of stone, as the fireballs claimed her people, and the fact that it was a miraculously low loss rate didn’t matter at all.
“It was a bland, tranquilized, life-adjusted, group-integrated sort of face – the face turned out in thousands of copies every year by the educational production lines on Terra.”
“One learns from books and example only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.”
Rebecca smiled. Demurely, she thought. Intended, at least. “Oh, it just seems that my father is a more accomplished linguist than these other doctors. Whatever else he may lack.”
“Well, of course!” Melissa snorted. “Americans are ignorant louts when it comes to language.” The schoolteacher planted her arms akimbo and gave Nichols and Adams the same glare which had cowed thousands of students over the years. “What?” she demanded. “Did you think you were actually smarter than these people?”