Alastair Reynolds

“What happened?”

“Let’s just say my efforts to reprogram the weapon were not an unqualified success, shall we, and leave it at that?” She hated discussing failure almost as much as she hated the thing itself.

“That’s how it went, wasn’t it Zebra?”

“It might,” she said. “If I happened to be colluding in your own delusions.”

He had never lost that mingled combination of awe and terror that welled up in him when confronted by the routinely huge distances of space.

“Is there anyone or anything in this city which can’t be bought?” I said, slipping him a note.

“Yeah,” the man said, laughing quietly. “But I’m not it.”

“Besides—we all know guns don’t kill people, do they?”

“No, it’s the small metal projectiles that generally do the killing,” Cahuella said, smiling.

But make no mistake. My counterpart is capable of a great deal of ruthlessness in pursuit of a just cause. He believes he has right on his side. And men who think they have right on their side are always the most dangerous sort.

I don’t question your loyalty, Skade. I just wonder exactly what it is you’re loyal to.

Clavain felt little in the way of regret; more a sense of quiet relief that they were past the negotiating stage and into the infinitely more honest arena of actual battle.

The battle sunk towards the horizon. Presently it would be gone, leaving a sky unsullied by human affairs.

Don’t overestimate your familiarity with technologies you barely understand. It could be your undoing.

“Don’t you agree with me?”

“On some distant theoretical level, just possibly.”

I learnt the true meaning of what was euphemistically described as close-quarters combat. No line-of-sight particle-beam weapons now; no delayed-detonation nano-munitions. What close-quarters combat meant was something which would have been infinitely more recognisable to a soldier of a thousand years earlier: the screaming fury of human beings packed so close together that the only effective way to kill each other was with sharpened metal weapons: bayonets and daggers, or with hands around each other’s throats; fingers pressed into each other’s eye-sockets. The only way to survive was to disengage all higher brain-functions and regress to an animal state of mind.

So I did. And in doing so, I learned a deeper truth about war. She punished those who flirted with her by making them like herself. Once you opened the door to the animal, there was no shutting it.