The End of All Things (Old Man's War, #6)

by John Scalzi

The next day, I got shot in the head. Before that happened, though, I fell out of my bunk. The falling out of the bunk was not the important part.

I had, bluntly, the worst fucking headache I had ever had in my life. I’m trying to think of the best way to describe it. Try this. Imagine a migraine, on top of a hangover, while sitting in a kindergarten of thirty screaming children, who are all taking turns stabbing you in the eye with an ice pick. Times six. That was the good part of my headache.

Unless this was the afterlife. But I doubted it was. I’m not much of a religious person, but most afterlives that I’d heard of were something more than a blank nothingness. If God or gods existed, and this was all they put together for eternal life, I wasn’t very impressed with their user experience. So: probably alive.

With this group. With the Equilibrium. Which is what they were calling themselves, anyway. I thought it was a stupid name. But they weren’t giving me a vote. And if they did I would probably name it “The League of Assholes,” so I don’t think they would mind not having my input.

That left one missile. That one went to my best guess as to where Control was. Because fuck that guy.

“Again I ask permission to be blunt.” “Ambassador Abumwe, at this point I cannot imagine you being otherwise.”

“Which news do you want first?” Vnac Oi asked me. I was in its office again, the first meeting of the sur. “You have good news?” I asked. “No,” Oi said. “But some of the news is less objectively bad than the rest.” “Then by all means let us begin with that.”

“We buy time where we may.” “You bought yourself time,” Oi agreed. “I don’t think it’s of very good quality.”

If I were to wander into the path of the beam I might be uncomfortable just long enough for my brain to register the pain before I was turned into a floating pile of carbon dust. That was not on my schedule for the day.

I waited for the last few seconds to deploy my nanobots into a parachute form, braking with an abruptness that would have killed an unmodified human body. Fortunately, I don’t have an unmodified human body.

“Me, I’m just glad to get through the thing alive. Call me uncomplicated.” “Uncomplicated.” “Thank you.

“You have five minutes,” I said. “Of course, because any more time would make this too easy.”

it was designed to operate with minimal assistance from humans, who were without exception the moving part most likely to fail.

The crowd was pushed back despite their best efforts. Some of them flung bottles and other objects toward the funnels and were surprised when they shifted course right back at them. Apparently you don’t have to understand physics to protest.

I’m going to shoot him twice now. We still need to bring him in alive, I said. I didn’t say I was going to kill him, Powell replied. Just that I was going to shoot him twice.

“Maybe we should find someplace to sit down and chat.” “Maybe you should just tell me right now because otherwise I might punch you, Wilson.”

You think I’m an asshole now, you should have seen me just before I left Earth. You would have pushed me off a building just on principle, and you wouldn’t have been wrong to do it.”

“Captain, the problem is not that I’m paranoid. The problem is that the universe keeps justifying my paranoia.”

When the drive failed, the ship exploded. And when I say “exploded” I mean “interacted catastrophically with the topography of space/time in ways we’re not entirely able to explain,” but “explode” gets the gist of it, particularly with regard to what would happen to a human caught in it.

On the other side of the door, literally and figuratively, were ambassadorial staff and experts and advisors, from Earth, from the Colonial Union, and from the Conclave. If one was quiet, one could feel their combined howling frustration at not being in the room at the moment.

I have always found that there’s an inverse relationship between the number of people in a room and the amount of useful work that can be done.

“And so we learn how simple it is to change the history of the universe,” Sorvalh said. “All you need is for every other thing to have gone so horribly wrong first.”

“I have an opening on my staff,” Danielle said. “I don’t want to work for you, Dani.” “I’m a terrific boss, and I’ll brutally sabotage the career of any underling who says different.”