Into the Light (Out of the Dark, #2)

by David Weber

“He wants to make me a fucking officer,” he growled finally. “I was a frigging E-8—a master sergeant—Dave. What do I know about being an officer? Hell, I worked for a living!”

Just think of the acronym—CUAFEF. How the hell do you pronounce that? Sounds like a cat throwing up in the corner, damn it!”

“if it’s silly, but it works, then it isn’t silly.”

But we don’t live in an ideal world, and everything doesn’t have to be perfect. All it has to do is to work for now. After we get through the crisis, we can start worrying about perfection.”

the one thing that couldn’t be disputed about capital punishment was that it had a very low rate of recidivism.

Mexican partners who can help us both reconstitute their country and turn it into another South American candidate

Um … Mexico is in North America.

Did the man find his moment, or did the moment produce the man?

‘Here we stand. We can do no other.’”

it only made sense to put as many as possible of the federal organs in the same place.

Seriously? After the clustering of national leaderships before the Shongairi attack led to their nearly instantaneous destruction?

manifestoes

-tos

the doctor replied. “It’s not a miracle. It’s just science.”

Clayton hadn’t expected the rifle’s finish to hold up once it was put into his soldiers’ hands—if you want to find five new ways to break something, give it to a soldier

had to admit the Charioteer Consort of Zyr was less mindlessly anti-Republic than many of her colleagues. Unfortunately, that just made her more dangerous. Opponents who thought about things made far more formidable foes than those who simply charged in.

I will not say “Klaatu barada nikto,” whatever Rob wants! he reminded himself. Although, he admitted, the temptation was great.

the new software could read human emotions with devastating accuracy. It could also parse them with a subtlety which would have been almost useless in most conversations simply because of information overload, so the psychiatrists and the programmers had come up with a color-valued system which used the six basic emotions Paul Ekman had identified in the middle of the last century: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise.

“Dave is tough. Besides that, Allah has plans for him. He wouldn’t have made him so irritating if He didn’t still expect great things out of him.”

“Thank you for the courtesy,” he said and smiled. “I’m afraid you must’ve mistaken me for somebody important, but I do appreciate it.”