It was a pleasure to burn.
It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history.
Woodchips…they should’ve given me something harder.
And the strangers beams burned brighter than all beams I’d seen before.
And the strangers shields were harder than the heart of any whore.
As the battle rent the eather, while we watched and shook our heads,
The pirate ships were cut to bloody shreds.
The pirate ships were cut to bloody shreds.
She’s a Fleet captain with only one regret: not enough pirates.
Long before space travel, when we hadn’t even filled up Terra, there used to be dirtside frontiers. Every time new territory was found, you always got three phenomena: traders ranging out ahead and taking their chances, outlaws preying on the honest men — and a traffic in slaves. It happens the same way today, when we’re pushing through space instead of across oceans and prairies. Frontier traders are adventurers taking great risks for great profits. Outlaws, whether hill bands or sea pirates or the raiders in space, crop up in any area not under police protection. Both are temporary. But slavery is another matter — the most vicious habit humans fall into and the hardest to break.
The Rabia Balkhi, registered to Captain Eric Khan out of Pallas, was still just goods and people heading into the frontier to stake a claim. Fewer horses, maybe, but more fusion reactors.
Although it has almost been forgotten, the New Frontiers was not the first starship. She had an older sister, the Vanguard, that left the Solar System a few years earlier than the momentous date on which Lazarus Long commandeered the New Frontiers.
Thoughts and feelings change sometimes, as one crosses the frontiers.
“Wait a second. We knock out the turret to get the fighters. But to get the turret, we gotta get through the fighters. We’re dead!”
“I’ll have it all figured out by the time we reach the Frontier.”
[alarm sounds]
“What’s that?”
“The Frontier.”
It’s against all principles of modern aerial combat!
Wait, the Butterfly Derby is when? And what?
Don’t take it the wrong way, you’re by far the nicest insect I’ve ever spent time with, but first contact is one thing. I’m not sure my reputation can take sleeping with the first alien I meet.
Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commisars didn’t care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo. Perhaps we could have figured this out about the Bugs by noting the grief the Chinese Hegemony gave the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance; however the trouble with ‘lessons from history’ is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins.”
Small victories are better than none.
I wanted to give you a victory. But by their essential nature triumphs can’t be given. They must be taken, and the worse the odds and the fiercer the resistance, the greater the honor. Victories can’t be gifts.
But gifts can be victories, can’t they. It’s what you said. The garden could have been your gift, a dowry of talent, skill, and vision.
It wasn’t a victory, only the end of the war.
When the dead walk, señores, we must stop the killing… or lose the war.
“If someone starts shooting, what do you expect me to do?”
"You'll think of something."They were two lovely choices. One of them meant giving up every chance of a decent life forever…and the other one scared me out of my mind.
“Fine, fine. I got it. Very scary numbers. How scary are they?”
"Well, on a scale of “that’s not free checking” to “heat death of the universe”, I’d say we’re looking at “the enemy has a super-weapon we can’t track.”
“Oh crap.”