Plague Ship quotes

“Go along with them,” Captain Jellico gave his final orders to the four, “as long as it doesn’t mean your own necks—understand?

On the other hand dead heroes have never helped to lift a ship.

And these gorp are tough from all accounts. You’ll just have to use your own judgment about springing your rods on them—” He looked distinctly unhappy at that thought.

Rather than sit idle he snapped on the reader—but, although facts and figures were dunned into his ears—he really heard very little. He couldn’t apply himself—not with a new specter leering at him from the bulkhead.

The dangers of the space lanes were not to be numbered; death walked among the stars a familiar companion of all spacemen.

And to the Free Trader it was the extra and invisible crewman on every ship that raised.

Rip stretched. For the first time in hours he seemed to have returned to his usual placid self. “Good thing somebody in this spacer watches Video serials—Ali, you can brief us on all the latest tricks of space pirates.

Nothing is so wildly improbable that you can’t make use of it sometime during a checkered career.

”

Rip snorted. “

Good old lacoil. You drink it, you wash in it, and now you kill off the Hydro with it.

Maybe we can give the company an extra testimonial for the official jabber and collect when we hit Terra. All right—Weeks,” he spoke to the little man, “you listen in on the com—it’s tuned to our helmet units.

“Of the outer rim,” Dane corrected, having already solved that problem for himself. “This must be farther in than any survey ship ever came.

Great Spirit of Outer Space, what has happened here?

”

There was no escape from that radiation—it would be in the air one breathed, strike though one’s skin.

And yet the wilderness flourished and beckoned.

“Mutations—” Rip mused. “Space, Tau’d go wild if he could see it!”

At the time he had resented, had even been slightly ashamed of being relegated to a Free Trading spacer while Artur Sands and other classmates from the Pool had walked off with Company assignments.

Now he knew that he would not trade the smallest and most rusty bolt from the Solar Queen for the newest scout ship in I-S or Combine registry.

And this boy from the frontier village might be himself as he was five years earlier. Though he had never known a real home or family, scrapping into the Pool from one of the children’s Depots.

You can run the emergency hookup singlehanded and you’re going to. We’re Free Traders—ha,” the man had lost some of his assurance as he stared from one drawn young face to another, “I see you begin to realize what that means.

Out on the Rim we play rough, and we play for keeps.

I know half a hundred ways to set you screaming in three minutes and at least ten of them will not even leave a mark on your skin! Now do we get Service—or don’t we?”

Ali smiled wearily, a stretch of lips in which there was little or no mirth. “Listen, my friend.

Since I started to ride rockets I’ve been told I wasn’t going to get away with this or that. Why not be more original?

Use what is between those outsize ears of yours. We fought our way in here—we landed at Terraport against orders—we’re Patrol Posted. Do you think that one man, one lone man, is going to keep us now from doing what we came to do?