Kali Altsoba > Kali's Quotes

“Silent, cruel Takeshi Watanabe at this moment is the most important man among all the teeming hundreds of billions who inhabit the Thousand Worlds. For he rides up to start a war among the stars. He will plant Pyotr’s lie on an airless moonlet yet change Orion forever. Troops and warships are waiting to gather at jump-off bohr points. Waiting on his word. They they’ll swarm over the Krevan frontiers to launch the first multi-system war in three centuries. 'It’s war at last! Gods, I do love it so!”
― Kali Altsoba, Invasion!: The Orion War

“A fat black fly sitting on a splintered willow trunk watches Kenji Hamaguchi die. She hears thudding! body parts landing and thinks not of what they once were or might have been but only of her own kind, and of how rare is such good fortune falling to her from the sky. Truth be told, it’s not as rare as she believes. For she is herself carrion spawn now in the hundred thousandth, millionth generation since a careful laying of eggs by an ancestor in a dead Frenchman’s eye at Verdun. The Lord of Flies is not so cruel or fickle as she thinks. War is good to flies.”
― Kali Altsoba, Exodus: The Orion War

“His plain, colorless akhalukhi falls from a collarless neck to the ground, sweeping the floor below his uneven ankles as he limps. Dauran mothers tell naughty boys and misbehaving girls that underneath the white shapeless cloth Jahandar the Tyrant stands naked on cloven hooves, and that he’ll come for them at night. The last bit is closer to the truth than a Dauran parent can admit to a frightened child. For that’s always the time his Shishi come, with a hard bang! bang! bang! on the cottage door.”
― Kali Altsoba, Jahandar: The Orion War

“Say farewell to the Twins. Krakoya system has already fallen to Jahandar’s vanity and Pyotr’s cunning. All that’s left to do is the killing and the dying, as the last tiny warships in the system, four old frigates and 10 jury-rigged police boats, rise to meet the whole Dauran battle fleet. They’re going to sing about this for centuries. They’ll call the ballad, “Death Ride of the Bantams.” They’ll sing sorrowfully and heroically, all together and all at once, of white tokamaks that tore apart the sky. They’ll sit all night in exile until the rise of alien dawns, playing dirges into the night of unfamiliar stars, mourning tens of millions taken by the storms. And hundreds of millions more taken by Shishi to far-off prison moons, or buried in long lime-pits astride killing fields of raped and murdered worlds. So do say a sad farewell to the Twins. Their fate is sealed. Daura is here. Jahandar is here.”
― Kali Altsoba, Alliance: The Orion War

“Call it whatever you want. Curse it however you like. Cross over it in pride, then come running back. It’s no one’s to control or survive. Not you, not them. Dark Territory, the Yue ming, belongs to neither the living nor the dead. The living who try to stay there always end up dead, while the dead who cannot leave are never allowed to rest. They’re prodded and probed by bots and scavengers, set atop booby-traps, nested-in by spiders and vipers, tossed-and-churned into bone chips and jelly by the next barrage or the one after that.”
― Kali Altsoba, Amasia: The Orion War

“Plasma escapes containment to displace great gulps of dirt and air. It turns running men and women into gray puffs of instant cinder, then blows them into dust with howling wind. A thick layer of surface sand ripples into moving sheets of gooey glass that flow stickily down flattened dunes, pooling into molten lakes at the bottom. Rolling sheets engulf craters and ruins, encasing scalded bones of dead armor and bits of wrecked trench works. More liquid glass captures screaming fighters inside hardening silicate globes. a man’s or woman’s last moment of life and pain and final scream trapped in clear, golden glass sarcophagi. They’ll cool later, lying atop the desert like huge, ancient insects locked in Triassic amber. They’ll be the most prized of all Amasian death-glass, illegal but kept anyway in secret private collections.”
― Kali Altsoba, Rikugun: The Orion War

“When the Royal Ambassador of the Three Kingdoms asked the old Dauran Emperor why he allowed the southern neutrals to expire, after fighting for years as their allies, the august monarch replied in the voice of imperial disdain: “Just because we’re allies, doesn’t mean I care.”
― Kali Altsoba, Alliance: The Orion War