MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT:
…you will see that we are about to have a report from the hairdressers fire development subcommittee today.
HAIRDRESSER:
That’s me.
FORD:
Yeah well you know what they’ve done don’t you? You gave them a couple of sticks and they’ve gone and developed them in to a pair of bloody scissors!
MARKETING GIRL:
When you have been in marketing as long as I have, you’ll know that before any new product can be developed, it has to be properly researched. I mean yes, yes we’ve got to find out what people want from fire, I mean how do they relate to it, the image -
FORD:
Oh, stick it up your nose.
MARKETING GIRL:
Yes which is precisely the sort of thing we need to know, I mean do people want fire that can be fitted nasally.
Well I have a lot of experience telling patients bad news, so let me break it to him gently. Fry, you have no nose! Your nose is gone! You have no nose on your face! Where it is I can’t say but on your face it’s not!
He looked at the viewscreen and couldn’t believe it. If the other ship were any closer, then it would’ve been up his nose! There was an urgent scuttling as the bridge crew scrambled back into their respective seats.
“Your stealth systems obviously are better than we’d expected, but I imagine we’ve located the majority of them at least approximately,” she continued, her tone only slightly more confident than she actually felt.
“Then watch your plot, Admiral,” Zavala invited in that same, cold voice, and Dubroskaya heard Diadoro inhale sharply. Her eyes darted to the main plot as CIC updated it…and an entire globe of icons—thirty of them, at least—appeared around her battlecruisers, keeping pace with them effortlessly at ranges as low as a light-second and a half, as they dropped their stealth. They glittered there, taunting her with their proximity, for at least ten seconds. Then, before her startled fire control officers could lock them up, they vanished mockingly once more. She had no doubt they were all busily streaking away to completely different positions from which to keep her under observation from within their protective cloak of invisibility.
Many older ships in the imperial space fleet reaching retirement age were being refitted with more modern equipment to extend their useful lives. Thus, technologically at least, Antares was currently one of the most advanced ships of the Imperial Space Fleet. Unfortunately, she was now also one of the most troubled. This is what the Phoenix refitting program had done to the Antares.
“…for all its apparent speed, the ship was almost perfectly silent, and he experienced an enervating, eerie feeling, as though the ancient warship, mothballed all those centuries, had somehow not yet fully woken up, and events within its sleek hull still moved to another, slower tempo, made half of dreams.”
No Odysseus would return to Ithaca from this Troy, and her heart ached as she imagined any bodies they hadn’t recovered voyaging endlessly across the silent, un-winking, uncaring stars. Imagined those funeral lights, scattered across a tomb as vast as the universe itself.
Not going to happen, she thought drunkenly, eyes stinging. Not on my watch. Not on John’s. Any of these people who’re still out here are going home, by God!
It calls back a time when there were flowers all over the Earth… and there were valleys. And there were plains of tall green grass that you could lie down in - you could go to sleep in. And there were blue skies, and there was fresh air… and there were things growing all over the place, not just in some domed enclosures blasted some millions of miles out in to space.
The Gobi wasn’t completely devoid of life; its ecosystem was unexpectedly extensive and varied given the extremes to which it subjected its denizens, but some of those forms of life weren’t the kind that Anna wanted to admire too closely.
She considered it a moment longer, then shook herself and gazed at the trees beyond the house and its attached greenhouses with a yearning that was almost a physical pain. Some kids knew they wanted to be spacers or scientists by the time they could pronounce the words, but Stephanie didn’t want stars. She wanted . . . green. She wanted to go places no one had ever been yet—not through hyper-space, but on a warm, living, breathing planet. She wanted waterfalls and mountains, trees and animals who’d never heard of zoos. And she wanted to be the first to see them, to study them, understand them, protect them. . . .
I wouldn’t need to be so very different for sun to seem to be about sun, for green to be about green, for joy and boredom and anguish and terror and death to all be themselves, beyond the need for any killing clarity, and then this–this, the growing rings of light and water and stone–would take up all of me, and be all the words I need.
Who would have thought of giving such a color to grass, if it is grass? It is what he calls grass, but it is not what I call grass. I wonder I should ever be content to see it as I saw it. It is a finer sky than I had known, and more structured hills. The old bones of them stand out for him as they do not for me, and he knows the water in their veins.
The woman named Rebecca Stearns replied. “Experiment with it then, Your Majesty. Use us as your laboratory. We will accept any religious minorities you find troublesome.”
Seeing the surprise in the king’s face, Rebecca smiled. “The American approach is the opposite, Your Majesty. We believe stability is found in fluid motion. Which lasts longer—the mountains or the sea?”
Gustav was a man of Scandinavia. He knew the answer.
Prosecutor : Are you Captain Lincoln F. Sternn?
Stern : [haughtily] I am.
Prosecutor : Lincoln Sternn, you stand here accused of 12 counts of murder in the first degree, 14 counts of armed theft of Federation property, 22 counts of piracy in high space, 18 counts of fraud, 37 counts of rape…
[pauses to check the criminal record]
Prosecutor : …and one moving violation. How do you plead?
Stern : [haughtily] Not guilty.
“I know he murdered our friend, but that will take you to a very dark place, Nick. We are going to turn Shufgar, alive and well, over to judges of House Est’ll. Then, per ancient tradition, he will be killed and eaten a little bit at a time.”
The Jinmoti of Bozlen Two kill the hereditary ritual assassins of the new Yearking’s immediate family by drowning them in the tears of the Continental Empathaur in its Sadness Season.