Fearless (The Lost Fleet, #2)

by Jack Campbell

My commanding officer commented afterward that as our losses equaled those of the Syndics, it would’ve been simpler if Captain Falco had only ordered each of his ships to ram one of the enemy ships, thereby achieving the same result with much less difficulty.”

Lives had been devoted to that city, building it and sustaining it and making it a human community, but all that was left now were the battered ruins, and within another century even those would be annihilated by the expanding star.

An explosion like that would fry not only everything inside the entire star system it’s in but also surrounding star systems.” “Yes,” Cresida agreed. “That’d be a negative outcome, obviously.”

Ignorance is bliss, he thought. No, that can’t be right. What I don’t know right now is driving me nuts. Ignorance is only blissful if you don’t know you’re ignorant.

The old saying had already occurred to him, that someone riding a tiger is fine except for the fact that the tiger is taking them where it wants and they don’t dare get off, because the instant they do, the tiger can turn on them.

“It’s not easy for dreams to die, even when they’ve remained only dreams.”

He had a second to wonder why fleeing ships almost always sought to “dive” down instead of “climb” up, as if they were aircraft or even people running on the surface of a world, even though the two directions were purely arbitrary and required exactly the same effort in space.