More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The physical stuff I could train myself up to do, I'm pretty sure. The difference is, I would never want to train that hard. I don't have the internal discipline, or the drive, to work that hard, I simply don't have enough desire to do it. I greatly admire the people who do make that level of commitment, and I'm glad I don't have to.
A touchdown. Or in soccer it would be a Goooooooal! The star, if you could call it that, was another dim red dwarf, a type of star I was getting jaded about already.
RC Bray is a frigging KING amongst narrators. His sense of fun is a lynchpin to why I love these books.
"For fighter aircraft, energy means airspeed, and the ability to gain airspeed. For instance, some fighters are fast in a straight line, but if they make a tight turn, they bleed off a lot of kinetic energy and slow down too much, and it takes a long time for them to regain airspeed. While they're slow, they're vulnerable. Vulnerable in air combat means dead."
What you experienced. the ship seeming to blink in and out of existence, actually happened. Every time the ship was destroyed in transit, the universe hit the reset button and restored us to existence. Because it had to."
"Wait. What did you say about the version of the Dutchman that came out of the wormhole? What do you mean 'version'?" "Hmm. That's not something I can tell to monkeys. Shouldn't have mentioned it." "Fine. I got a whopping headache anyway. What's next?"
That's where Smythe's greater experience and training showed, against my own. He considered anything that could go wrong, I'd only thought of things likely to go wrong. That was one difference with elite soldiers; they left almost nothing to chance.
"Bottom Line Up Front. BLUF. Tell me the important stuff first. Come on, you know US military slang."
In Britain, we have walking trails that go from one village to the next. You can stop at a pub for lunch and dinner, and stay in a guesthouse overnight. It's very popular, particularly in areas such as the Cotswolds and the Yorkshire Dales."
"In case you're wondering what I'm doing, it's only one hundred percent, gold-plated, grade-A awesomeness, Joe! Although, when you think about it, part of that expression doesn't make any sense. You're trying to convince your audience that something is genuinely, indisputably awesome, right? Then why would you brag about something being gold-plated? Why not solid gold? Hmm, maybe I got the expression wrong?
Ha! My high school classmates had not voted me 'Most likely to end up encased in a comet orbiting the outer reaches of an alien star system', somehow they had missed that one. They hadn't voted me Class Clown or anything cool like that, either.
“It’s impossible to idiot-proof anything, Skippy,” I explained, “because idiots are so darned clever. Idiots will always find a way to screw things up.”
