‘Let’s go, Mandella. I’m freezin’ my balls off.’ ‘Me, too,’ the girl said with more feeling than logic.
I watched her walk away and thought that if anybody could make a fighting suit look sexy, it’d be Sean. But even she couldn’t.
middle of the base, we’ll come to this big flower-shaped
military records and tests we had taken at Threshold. I was a company
Far out, as my mother used to say. ‘Oh, Private,’ I called to the waiter, ‘bring me one of those Antares things.’ Sitting here in a bar with an asexual cyborg who is probably the only other normal person on the whole goddamned planet. ‘Make it a double, please.’
‘Guess it’s all right,’ I said. Maybe good for morale. ‘But if it starts getting in the way, I’ll personally recycle it.’ ‘Yes, sir!’ he said, visibly relieved, thinking that I couldn’t really do anything like that to such a cute bundle of fur. Try me, buddy. So we
Most of them either had English as their native tongue or as a second language, but it had changed so drastically over 450 years that I could barely understand it, not at all if it was spoken rapidly. Fortunately, they had all been taught early twenty-first century English during their basic training; that language, or dialect, served as a temporal lingua franca through which a twenty-fifth century soldier could communicate with someone who had been a contemporary of his nineteen-times-great-grandparents. If there had still been such a thing as grandparents.
A Greek phalanx must have looked pretty impressive, but it wouldn’t do too well against a single man with a flamethrower.