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Seven of the riders - five standing, two still mounted - collapsed into the dust, in fourteen separate pieces.
she suspected a fair few of the ships themselves weren’t totally together in the sanity department, either.
‘Xeny; you are a million-tonne starship; a Torturer class Rapid Offensive Unit.
‘Even without your principal armament, I bet you could waste planets if you wanted to -’ ‘Aw, come on; any silly GCU can do that!’
Oh, and look for wars, of course. Especially wars that aren’t too big . . . and interesting wars, know what I mean?’
‘refuse to acknowledge machine sentience fully; they exploit proto-conscious computers and claim only human subjective experience has any intrinsic value; carbon fascists.’
‘Cheradenine Zakalwe; I fight wars.’
‘Humanoids are the galaxy’s way of trying to get rid of all that alcohol.’
‘Sort of. I was born two hundred and twenty years ago, I have lived for a hundred and ten of them, and physically I’m about thirty.’
‘So many scars, Zakalwe,’ she said, shaking her head, tracing lines across his chest. ‘I keep getting into scraps,’ he admitted. ‘I could have all these heal completely, but . . . they’re good for . . . remembering.’
The method was that taking and bending of materials and people to one purpose, the outlook that everything could be used in the fight; that nothing could be excluded, that everything was a weapon, and the ability to handle those weapons, to find them and choose which one to aim and fire; that talent, that ability, that use of weapons.
He loved the plasma rifle. He was an artist with it; he could paint pictures of destruction, compose symphonies of demolition, write elegies of annihilation, using that weapon.
‘To the Culture,’ he said, raising his glass to the alien. It matched his gesture. ‘To its total lack of respect for all things majestic.’
‘Well, impacting at four or five kilometres a second wouldn’t leave it totally undented, I suspect.’
and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.”’
