Kindle Notes & Highlights
Sylveste had been right when he told Girardieau that the ceremony was not painful, but neither was it entirely pleasant. What it was was a sudden flowering of intense cold, as if liquid helium were being blasted into his cortex.
Pascale's vial injected into Dan's temple
Pascale’s cells—floating as they did in a stew of helper medichines—would soon bond with Sylveste’s own.
Pascelle's cells soon would bond with Dam's own
the transplanted cells carried the indelible impression of their last host: ghost threads of holographically distributed memory and personality.
Transplanted Cells contained the memories of Pascale
The woman who had uncapped the amber jar was gone, her seat glaringly vacant. Fragrant, autumnal, the odour from the jar made Sylveste think of crushed leaves. He wanted to sneeze. Something was wrong. The room flashed turquoise blue, as if a hundred pastel fans had just opened. Peacocks’ tails, springing open. A million tinted eyes. The air turned grey. “Get down!” Girardieau screamed. He was scrabbling madly at his neck. There was something hooked in it, something tiny and barbed. Numbly, Sylveste looked at his tunic and saw half a dozen comma-shaped barbs clinging to it.
Birds were a trigger to a.woman with an off-world assassin's weapom
some kind of hormonal trigger, keyed to receptors Janequin had put in the birds. He had to have been part of it. He looked—but Janequin was dead. A tiny dagger sat in his chest, trailing hot rivulets down his brocade jacket.
Hormonal trigger
her friends were entering, garbed in chameleoflage. They wore close-fitting breather masks and infrared goggles. He pushed Pascale behind a jumble of upturned tables. “They’re looking for us,” he hissed. “But they probably think we’re already dead.” Girardieau’s surviving security people had fallen back and taken up defensive positions, kneeling within the fan-shaped auditorium. It was no match: the newcomers carried much heavier weapons, heavy boser-rifles. Girardieau’s militia countered with low-yield lasers and projectile weapons, but the enemy were cutting them apart with blithe,
...more
More.assissins.entered, with heaviwr weapons than the security guards
would project outside the ship when they were used, they potentially offered routes for enemy weapons to penetrate the ship by viral means. So the gunnery was isolated: protected from the rest of the ship’s dataspace by a one-way trapdoor.
Gunnery systems isolated from all otherc shipboard systems to prevent enemy hacks
“Whatever it was got there by mistake.”
Whatevercis buried in the gunnery software got there by mistake
“It used the dogs to escape, Khouri. Or at least for a part of itself to escape. It used them to get into your head.”
Part of the Sun Stealers now are in your head, Khouri
and it took moments for Sylveste to grasp that his eyes were only perceiving three of four images a second. The world moved with the stuttering motion of the pencil cartoons children made in the corners of books, flicked into life between thumb and forefinger. Every few seconds there were upsetting inversions of depth, when Falkender would appear to be a man-shaped recess carved into the cell’s wall, and sometimes part of his visual field would jam, not changing for ten or more seconds,
Restored sight only monochrome, and only with a 3-4 second scan rate
had tested it years ago at the very lowest range of its destructive settings… against a small moon. Extrapolating—and she was very good at extrapolating—the weapon would have no trouble dismantling a planet even at a range of hundreds of AU. There were things inside it which had the gravitational signatures of quantum black holes, yet which, strangely, refused to evaporate.
Lose weapon emits black holes. Volvoyna Previously tested it on a small moon
“You can’t do it, can you? Because you believe me. Once you open that connection, there’s no going back.” She increased the pressure, feeling the slight give as the control threatened to close. Then—either via some unconscious neuromuscular twitch, or because part of her knew it had to be done, she closed the connection. The gunnery environment enfolded around her,
You cant do it: You knkw your brain wiill be invaded by the Sun Stealer Khouri does it anyhow
