In space, no one can hear you scream.
They hit with a bone-breaking shock, and Malcolm clung to her weapons, grunting in anguish as the harness straps bit into her. She heard someone else scream, but the pilot had known what he was doing. The skimmer porpoised across the ground in a bow wave of shredded moss, shedding bits and pieces through a billowing cloud of dust, yet they were down and intact.
And thousands of screaming Medusan nomads were charging straight after them.
My old flight instructor used to say a warrior only flew three Vipers. The one you train in, the one you fight in…and the one you die in.
She had nothing to take back but failure, and bad news and one violent-tempered wild sand viper that might or might not be useful. She untied the serpent case and laid it gently on the ground.
"This is beautiful.
“Yeah. But where there’s a garden, there’s snakes.”
So instead of cleaning up the snakes’ nest once and for all, the RMN had spent over a century policing the Silesian trade lanes and letting the Confederacy’s citizens slaughter one another to their homicidal hearts’ content.
The colossal Snake slumped to the floor. Immediately, it began to decay, as if time had been speeded up.
Again, Snake? Again you annoy Me?
“You know,” Michelle Henke said thoughtfully, tipped back in her chair with her feet propped somewhat inelegantly on the coffee table, “these Sollies are beginning to severely piss me off.”
I want these off the ship. I don’t care if takes every man we’ve got, I want them off the ship.
“Never waste fuel, Mr. Staley. You may want it later.”
Jupiter, however, was the SLN’s primary source of reactor fuel, and with such a superabundance of that fuel at hand, it had made sense to locate the Navy’s major asteroid refineries and fabrication center in the same place. Ganymede’s endless oceans of liquid water had been another major consideration. The “moon” was bigger than many of the galaxy’s planets—it was the ninth largest body in the Solarian system, for that matter—with a fully differentiated interior, a molten metallic core, and more liquid water than Old Terra itself. Getting to it through so many miles of ice had been a significant engineering challenge in the early days of system exploration but posed no particular difficulty these days. And with access to liquid water and plentiful fuel, came an effectively unlimited supply of oxygen and hydrogen.
You depend on luck, you end up on the drift… no fuel, no prospects.
When Strongheart counted out to him the net proceeds of the voyage, Kinnison scratched reflectively at his whiskery chin.
“That ain’t hardly enough, I don’t think, for the real, old-fashioned, stem-winding bender I was figuring on,” he ruminated. “I been out a long time and I was figuring on doing the thing up brown. Have to let go of my nugget, too, I guess. Kinda hate to—been packing it round quite a while—but here she is.” He reached into his kit-bag and tossed over the lump of really precious metal. “Let you have it for fifteen hundred credits.”
If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.
She moved slowly, hands folded behind her, and her face was composed and serene. But Rafael Cardones knew her too well. He’d seen that same serenity while she kicked a dispirited, hostile crew back to life . . . and when she’d taken a crippled heavy cruiser on a death-ride straight into a battlecruiser’s broadside. Now he saw it again, on the night before she met a man who hated her with a pistol in her hand, and he wondered how many years she’d needed to perfect that mask. How long to learn to hide her fear? To learn how to radiate confidence to her crew by concealing her own mortality from them? And how long, how many nights of pain and loneliness, to hide the fact that she cared—cared more than she should ever let herself care—about the people around her?
“I assumed that a person wore whatever mask he liked.”
“Certainly,” said Rolver. “Wear any mask you like–if you can make it stick.”
I leaned forward and ripped the mask from her face.
I really don’t know why I should have expected her face to be anything else. It was very pale, of course, and there weren’t any cosmetics. I suppose there’s no point in wearing any under a mask. The eye-brows were untidy and the lips chapped. But as for the general expression, as for the feelings crawling and wriggling across it—
Have you ever lifted a rock from damp soil? Have you ever watched the slimy white grubs?
In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted, it may well be supposed that no ordinary appearance could have excited such sensation. In truth the masquerade license of the night was nearly unlimited; but the figure in question had out-Heroded Herod, and gone beyond the bounds of even the prince’s indefinite decorum. There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made. The whole company, indeed, seemed now deeply to feel that in the costume and bearing of the stranger neither wit nor propriety existed. The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revellers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood --and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.
“Take off the mask!”
“Mr. McGee, please. My life is not a happy one.”