Zero Hour Quotes
"I think it was in a drawer; that is where I put it, but I hadn’t seen it in a while."
"Yes, thank you, I did not need any reminding that my big gamble was so far a complete failure."
"Taking a sip of coffee gave me time to bite my tongue, avoiding the smart-ass remark I wanted to make."
"What I saw standing in front of me, in the galley of a disabled alien pirate ship forty seven hundred lightyears from Earth, was simply a frightened human being."
"In the military, I had learned that ‘I do not know’ is an acceptable answer."
"Our science team, in Kristang armored spacesuits and accompanied by a SpecOps team to keep them out of trouble, were poking around in Reactor Two."
"We could get six, maybe seven months out of it? That’s a guess."
"The Marine Corps doesn’t much care whether you’re having a good morale day or not. You do your job, regardless."
"Sergeant, whether it works or not, sending Nagatha in like that was a gutsy call."
"We’ve gotten out of plenty of impossible situations before."
"Skippy’s beer can was still cold, with no change in status our sensors were able to detect."
"The ship was trapped in interstellar space, a dozen lightyears from the Lagoon nebula in the Sagittarius Arm of the galaxy."
"What mattered was that we had no way to get to a habitable planet, and the ship was slowly dying around us."
"The worst thing that could happen was Nagatha could disappear, and we would never know what happened to her."
"If we ever got back to Earth, the families of our fallen would not see my letters, as they weren’t cleared to know the truth about the Merry Band of Pirates."
"I did not need a fourth cup of coffee that day, I had walked to the galley merely because I had not much else to do."
"The Flying Dutchman drifting slowly through empty interstellar space, there wasn’t much for me to do."
"Trying to use our wonky jump drive might be more dangerous than explosively compressing the plutonium cores of our nukes."
"Our pirate ship is so beat up right now, it can’t do half the things it was designed to do."
"I can communicate with and control shipboard systems. But I can no longer enhance their capabilities."
"Most of my mass, memory and processing power are not in this local spacetime."
"Skippy told me I had to give him a new joke every day, as a sort of payment for keeping the reactors functional."
"I am using all my brainpower to restore Reactor Three to full functioning, I will examine the jump drive coils later."
"Skippy, dear, we talked about you calling the crew monkeys."
"That drawer held some of my cold-weather gear, and since I hadn’t experienced cold weather in a while, that gear hadn’t gotten any usage."
"Damn, that was a close one. Joe, you really should have notified me earlier there was a problem with the ship’s bots, you dumdum."
"The Flying Dutchman can’t do anything it wasn’t designed to do. Hell, our pirate ship is so beat up right now, it can’t do half the things it was designed to do."
"Instead, with Hans Chotek there holding a full cup of coffee and a muffin like he planned to be there a while, I decided to go back to my office."
"Skippy, the Merry Band of Pirates runs into way too many situations where there is only one possible course of action for us."
"Raptors, this is Raptor Lead. Dutchman needs to break off their attack to deal with vampires, it’s up to us now."
"There wasn’t anything she could do to directly help the Dutchman; what she could do was perform her own assigned task quickly and efficiently."
"The priority is to keep them away from the Condors."
"The ride down to the surface of Barsoom was worse."
"The objective looks abandoned, just as Skippy said."
"The pirates who came through the opening in the dome before Smythe saw the threat before he did, and they dealt with the Wurgalan quickly and efficiently."
"Impaaaaaaaired? No! No way, man. I’m, I’m thinking clearly for, like, the first time ever."
"You’re my best friend, Joe. The first friend I ever had. I love you, man."
"Compression algorithms, Joe. Yes, I was optimizing my autonomic functions, why?"
"This idiot says Jar-Jar Binks must be a Sith."
"Hey, Mister Genius, we went to Barsoom and Bravo even though I figured the odds of us recovering a working conduit at each of those places was less than five percent."
"Because if that star system has intact Elder technology, it would be an enormous prize to capture."
"Because no one has useful data about what is truly in that star system, no one can design a ship or probe to successfully bring back data."
"I am sincere that I want to forget about it, is that good enough?"
"Even in my currently reduced capacity, I am an Elder AI. I can transmit the identification codes that will grant us access."
"You convinced him to risk exposure to save UNEF on Paradise. And you recently convinced a career diplomat to start an alien civil war."
"It was picked green ten months ago, put into cold storage, then the supplier used a gas like ethylene to force it to ripen."
"You’re not alone, Skippy, you have the Merry Band of Pirates with you."
"First you notice the vodka in the liquor cabinet is getting watered down, because bread has been drinking it."
"What’s worse is when there’s an empty chair at the Thanksgiving table because bread is in prison."
"We are about to hit the upper atmosphere shortly."
"It’s not porn, Adams," I hastened to say, and turned the tablet to toward her.
"I have never been that drunk," Adams declared with what I took to be a mixture of disgust and admiration.
"I want this rock," I kicked the stupid thing with the toe of a boot, "to die. I can hear it laughing at us."
"Or wifi," she added. "I don’t know how they survived."
"I thought that was the end of it, but the Dragon must have impacted on an underwater slope, because it rolled again and kept rolling, tumbling side to side many times and nose over tail at least twice."
"The truth was, I was so stunned and scared, I couldn’t move."
"It was annoying and it hurt my ears listening to it."
"I was shivering from being in that icy lake water, would the cold prevent the patch material from solidifying?"
"Being short of time, and being a guy, I of course did not bother to attempt reading the instructions."
"The instruments were printed in Kristang script and my ability to read Kristang was limited to things like ‘Danger’ and ‘Bathroom’."
"The whole ship shuddered and for a split second it hung balanced on the flattened tail structure."
"After rocking side to side for a moment, partly due to water sloshing around inside, the Dragon came to rest mostly on its belly."
"What worried me most was if the beings who fired a missile at our Dragon were a danger to crash survivors."
"You won’t do anyone any good if you’re dead, understood?"
"Someone just shot us down with a missile. It is their fault."
"This water is too cold for us to survive long out here."
"The trees up away from the lake are larger, give us more cover."
"The longer they waited, the more time the sniper had to sight in on their positions."
"The advanced technology of the Rindhalu and Maxolhx would have given them a better chance of reaching the surface here after their ships were disabled."
"You are at the bottom of a lake in a crashed dropship, and what you care most about is who shot at you?"
"You and Joe were promoted by the Kristang, for what your armies would describe as simply doing your jobs."
"Morality is very important to me. On a basic level, it is the only thing that is truly important to me."
"I don’t care about any of that crap. Joe acted decisively and bravely at Fort Arrow."
"The reason I care that the four of you respect me is that you all were in jail, because you all had to make very difficult moral decisions."
"I’m hoping that will not be a problem, Skippy," I unstrapped from the pilot seat, preparing myself for ducking into the bone-chilling water.
"We can debate moral issues later. Have you thought of a way to rescue Colonel Bishop?"
"It’s not a little mud, Skippy. It’s a freakin’ ocean of quicksand."
"The maintenance system responsible for these tunnels is not happy about someone screwing with equipment down here."
"I’m working on it," Skippy announced, annoyed. "Damn it, I can’t establish a connection."
"Somebody idiot-proofed these bots, and I’m apparently an idiot."
"Who is- Oh, this is hopeless, totally hopeless."
"Oh, man, I get it now. Waiting for something that never happens."
"You know what is the worst thing about standing in line at the DMV? When you lose at Clerk Roulette."
"No, Skippy. It’s not an official thing. It’s like, you’re waiting in line and there are three clerks behind the counter."
"By the time you get to the head of the line again, the cute girl is on break."
"How do you meatsacks manage to get anything done when you have so many distractions?"
"You should put your thinking back inside the box, Joe."
"Joe, of all the monkey-brain ideas you ever had, this is without question the craziest!"
"The laws of physics are shaking their heads at you."
"We will survive because the jump drive coils will not be attached to the Flying Dutchman."
"Hoooo-leeeee, Logic just told me it owes you an apology."
"Our jump drive coils will explode, but the Dutchman will survive."
"I just got a call from Logic. It is coming here to bitch-slap you."