I can't believe I'm posting to this thread, but....
Excerpts from FT: 27-Feb-98 Re: SF Quotes by Jonathan white@bolton.ac
> "Sad case of Pikal envy". May not have been the most popular
(Ivanova trying to entice smugglers to bring in food, instead of drugs):
"We've got the best mechanics in the sector... no cost.... And, if you have an
accident, we'll repair your ships. And, sooner or later, your ships *will*
have accidents." "My pilots don't have accidents." "They will. I'll see to
it." "You wouldn't." "I've got a 200 megawatt pulse cannon in the forward
cargo bay that says otherwise."
> At 10:15 27/02/98 -0500, you wrote:
> (Ivanova trying to entice smugglers to bring in food, instead of
My favourite Ivanova line was when Sinclair, Sheridan et al. look to
her for her opinion of the proposed time-travel;
"I'll be in the car."
I'm taking a little licence here and posting a couple of (slightly edited)
paragraphs instead of a quote, but I think it's evocitive as hell, so here
goes:
. . . You could think of a pulsedrive as a series of micro-fusion
bombs and field shielding and reaction heated to plasma, or as a sword of
radiation
and high-energy particles tens of kilometers long.
That was the Staff way of seeing it. Her imagination flashed other images
on the inner screen of her consciousness. The matte-black shaped of the
Limpers falling outward. A shallow disk perched on a witch's maze of tubing
like some mad oil refinery, all atop the great convex soup-plate of the
pusher. The dozen crewfolk locked in their cocoons of armor and sensors,
decision-making units in a dance of photonics. Units that sweated with
fears driven below consciousness; the ringing impact of crystal
tesseract-mines
scattering their high-vee shrapnel through hulls and bodies, blood
boiling into vacuum. The pulse of a near miss and secondary gamma sleeting
invisibly through the body, wreaking the infinitely complex balances of the
cells. Tumbling in a wrecked ship, puking and delerious and dying slowly from
thirst.
. .
Fears that carried down from the ground ape; hindbrain reflexes that twitched
muscles in a desperate need to flee or fight, pumped juices into the blood,
roiling minds that must stay as calm as the machines that were master and
slave both. (...) The slamming impact of deceleration; railguns,
lightguns, mineshowers, missile and counter-missile, the parasite bombs
driving their one megoton X-ray beams like the icepicks of the gods. The
drives punching irresitibly through fields and shieldings; perhaps a single
second for the stricken to know their fate as plasma boiled through the
corridors.
Silence. Long slow zero-g fading past, waiting for the sensors to
tell you if you were already dead...
Thats from the Stone Dogs, by S. M. Stirling,and I always thought of this as
one of the best descriptions of near-future space combat. Doesn't really
fit in the tone of FT, but what the heck.
Don