I can wait for the galaxy outside to get a little kinder.
Victor smiled politely in return, the way someone smiles when they’re thanked for having done a minor favor in times past. Held open a door in the rain, lent someone a small amount of money, butchered an ex-lover, that sort of thing.
I doubt I was much of a storyteller, but I would have put that smile in my book. On page 104, right next to the image of the Ward. I would have written it on my heart. I would have proofread it a thousand times under a thousand moons until a thousand tears thoroughly rationalized what it meant to me. Each time for when I’d met the darkness, and then succumbed. The smile read “you can’t break me’”—bold and in italics.
He smiled like a sun lamp.
This was such a time. She felt a certain smile spreading across her face, in response.* That smile.* The involuntary one that sometimes came upon her, and made men forget her metabolism.
This smile sank deep into her marrow and made her heart soar like the shuttles piercing the stratosphere.
His earliest memories were of standing with his nose pressed to the window on the south side of his parents’ modest house, watching the atmospheric counter-grav freighters drive across the heavens, splashed in sunlight and cloud shadow, gleaming like the Tester’s own promise of beauty. Pygmies compared to the doomed ships outside his shuttle at the moment, but enormous for pre-Alliance Grayson.
And even more so for the imagination of a little boy who’d realized even then that ships had souls. That anything that lovely, that graceful—anything that many men had given so much of themselves to—had to be alive itself.
“Attention, aboard the shuttle! You are under arrest! Surrender immediately! Come out slowly, in single file, with your hands behind your heads! Leave all weapons behind. Comply and your lives will be spared!”
Please put down your weapon. You have 20 seconds to comply.
“I am Admiral Harrington, Royal Manticoran Navy,” she said, and something deep inside Gregoire Koenig shrank from that soprano scalpel. “I accept your surrender in the name of the Grand Alliance. Be aware that any resistance to my boarding parties will be met with instant lethal force and that my acceptance of your surrender is contingent upon the surrender of your intact databases. If those databases are not intact, or if any resistance is offered to my boarding parties by any individual, I will regard * all* of your personnel as having violated the terms of your surrender and act accordingly.”
She smiled, and somehow it was the most frightening thing Koenig had ever seen.
“You won’t like it if that happens,” she said very, very softly, “but I will.”
“The contents of this computer are too dangerous, Julius. Not just to me.”
I have placed information vital to the survival of the Rebellion into the memory systems of this R2 unit.
I’m not sure of anything, Flora, except that a rebellion is in the cards. Something like the Uprising of 750, except that it will probably be worse.
“According to Melissa Mailey, we now live in a world where kings and noblemen rule the roost. And they’ve turned all of central Europe—our home, now, ours and our childrens’ to come—into a raging inferno. We are surrounded by a Ring of Fire. Well, I’ve fought forest fires before. So have lots of other men in this room. The best way to fight a fire is to start a counterfire. So my position is simple. I say we start the American Revolution—a hundred and fifty years ahead of schedule!”
And a special thanks for not burning up the whole ship. Including yourself.
She was my friend. Briefly, she was my lover. She was braver than I ever would have been in the moment of death. And I bet she was a hell of a shooting star.
Grief is not productive. It simply represents an inefficiency in accepting change of status.
“Shared pain is lessened; shared joy increased.”
We’re all in it together.
Diversity doesn’t weaken us — it binds us together.