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Even the ones with two brain cells to rub together
(and she could count the ones who had even that many brain cells on the fingers of one hand, she thought sourly)
would have been an outright threat to her litt...
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And that’s as much evidence of their intelligence as that woven net of his, she thought. I know a planet’s a big place, but from the pattern of the raids, they’ve got to be at least as widely distributed
as our settlements and freeholds. And if they are, then the only way people could’ve missed spotting at least one of them for over fifty T-years, even with the Plague, would be for them to deliberately avoid humans. And that’s a reasoned response. It means they had to actually plan to hide from us, and that kind of coordinated planning means they have to be able to talk to each other, and that means they must have a common language and some way to communicate over distances at least as widespread as we are!
A certain number of bumps, scrapes, contusions, bruises, or even broken bones were among the inevitable rites of childhood,
In fact, he sometimes thought people were even less understanding about little personal “quirks” like that now than they’d been before the Diaspora carried humanity to the stars. The prejudice against “genies” could extend itself to almost anything someone found peculiar or different, whether or not the difference in question really had anything at all to do with actual genetic manipulation.
And the fact that people who allowed themselves to be prejudiced that way were seldom exactly mental giants didn’t mean they couldn’t do a lot of damage.
she could always use a heavier weapon to stop something smaller than a hexapuma,
but a popgun wouldn’t be much use if she and Lionheart found themselves reprising their original performance without the rest of his clan in attendance.
“Never draw a weapon unless you intend to use it, Stephanie,”
“Never aim a weapon at another person unless you intend to shoot her. And never shoot at another person unless you intend to kill her.”
“If you aim a weapon at someone else, you raise the stakes. Whoever it is has to assume you will—or may, at least—pull the trigger. If she’s willing to back down, well and good. If she’s not, and some people won’t be, she may decide to go for broke, instead. If she’s got a weapon of her
own, she’ll use it. If she doesn’t, she’ll try to take your weapon, and if that happens, she’ll probably use it against you. So never think for a moment that simply waving a gun at someone is going to magically make them do whatever it is you want them to do. “But the flip side of that is that you’d better be sure—damned sure—the stakes are worth escalating a confrontation that way. If there’s any
question in your mind that stopping the other person justifies killing her, then it doesn’t. Because the truth is that once you shoot someone, you can never put that bullet back into the gun. It’s going to hit them, Stephanie, and if it comes out of something as powerful as the pistol we’ve been teaching you to use, the odds are that it will kill whoever you shoot, whether that’s what you want or ...
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if it comes to that—to kill. Not to wound your opponent like some holo drama hero. To kill. Because you’ve decided it’s better they be dead than that you or someone else be dead. If you’re justified in shooting at all, then your sole object should be to neutralize the other person as quickly as possible, and the fastest way to do that is to shoot to kill. And...
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those who had chosen to make themselves enemies came in two categories: those who had been properly dealt with, and those who were still alive.
I did not precisely object, you know,
As a clan elder, however, it is my responsibility to ask such questions. Now that you have answered me, how do we wish to do this thing?>
