Tell me everything it explains, he said when he could remember how to speak. Being forced to move moist flaps of meat in order to form the words felt sensual and obscene.
Trashy people puke, Tilly said. Ladies are unwell.
If this isn’t important, I will rip your throat open and piss down your lungs.
It wouldn’t be the first unfamiliar finger up his ass.
It throbbed with an inhuman power, tidal and deep and painful. Look at this too long, Elvi thought, and I will lose my mind in it. She took a step toward it, feeling the structures in the blackness re...
He stretched, ate his last bite of fungal curds, drank the dregs of something not entirely unlike coffee, and headed out to keep peace in wartime.
You can order the sun to come up if you time it right. I’m not driving this bus. Making it do what I want would be like talking someone out of a seizure.
The moral high ground is a lovely place. It won’t stop a missile, though. It won’t alter the trajectory of a gauss round.
He is, however, Amos continued, keeping a constant rail gun lock on the Israel’s reactor.Holden ran his fingers through his hair. So not too generous, then.Say pretty please, but carry a one-kilo slug...
First mutiny? Naomi said.Yeah. It’s not really something I do.It gets easier.
The margins of the space were bright without illuminating anything or casting shadows, sharp and terrible. It reminded her of the way schizophrenics and people suffering migraines would describe light...
Fayez whistled low. That is not dead which can eternal lie. Or, y’know, whatever.
Chapter Five: ElviA few decades earlier and about two hundred thousand trillion kilometers from where she currently sat, a tiny node of active protomolecule in a biological matrix had entered the orbi...
War without end. Well, what was history without that? And how would having the stars change anything?
Tilly screamed. Anna’s shocked brain only registered annoyance at the sound. Really, when had someone screaming ever solved a problem? She recognized her fixation on this irritation as her own way of...
He remembered the old-timers from his navy days. Grizzled lifers who could soundly sleep while two meters away their shipmates played a raucous game of poker or watched the vids with the volume all th...
We're all traitors now. Ha! the old lady said. Only if we lose.
His strike force stood around him, craning their necks, in awe of the massive emptiness all around. He was almost sorry to pull his attention back to the small, vaguely intimate necessities of violenc...
A few generations living and dying without a sky, and enclosed spaces lost the atavistic terror of premature burial.
The grass is always greener on the other side of personal extinction.