Tag: adventure, science-fiction, space-opera

She settled back in the chair and draped one leg casually over the other, her hands coming to rest together on her knee.“Arrest me. Torture me. Parade me about in the public square. You will have your prize catch. And you will lose everything.

Individuals reacted in any number of ways to extreme stress and, relatedly, to impending death.A non-negligible percentage of people reacted in a manner which could be summed up by, ‘Screw it, I’m going out in style!

He wanted to grind every Federation world into dust beneath his boot as his army blazed a trail of blood and corpses all the way to Seneca.He wanted to storm their inner sanctum and fire a laser into the skull of their Field Marshal while their Chairman watched, then fire a laser into the skull of their Chairman.He wanted to burn their bodies on a pyre and carry the ashes back to Deucali and spread them on his mother’s consecrated grave.

She gazed at the bay of wrecked shuttles in dismay. The last of her adrenaline seeped away at the sight of the widespread destruction.It occurred to her then, for perhaps the first time in this long nightmare, that she was going to die.

If her daughter’s ship had been disintegrated in space there would never be evidence of it, never an answer to what had happened to her.If she stopped to ponder the implications she might break. And Admiral Miriam Solovy did not break.

Blood drummed in her ears and adrenaline coursed through her veins, driving her to move. To act. Her hands trembled against his chest.Time vanished out from beneath her feet, one accelerating second at a time.

They flew high above savanna grassland. The sky was the deep cornflower blue of a sunny late afternoon on Earth…exactly the color of a sunny late afternoon on Earth.Only there was no sun. Whatever was lighting this planet, it wasn’t a star.

His punch knocked her back a meter into the wall. His fist had moved of his own volition, carrying a rage and frustration all its own. To his dismay, she didn’t fall. People so small as her always fell.No tears pooled in her eyes; instead they flared golden amber as she rubbed her jaw and pushed off the wall to stand rigid straight. A peculiar smile danced across her lips as blood trickled from the corner of her mouth and down her chin.

As soon as he had departed she directed her attention to the others.“I need a shielded containment box, radiation gloves and a micro welding torch. And a crescent wrench.

You’re insane.”“It’ll work.”“Which does not alter the fact that you are insane.

He steadied himself by resting one palm on her thigh and the other on the armrest, and rose to his knees. “I’ll be damned.”“Possibly. But not today, I think.

If humanity is annihilated because we were too busy squabbling with one another to manage a proper stand, we probably deserve the annihilation.