Book: Consider Phlebas
Quotes of Book: Consider Phlebas
Don't!" he had time to shout, but the gun was already in the woman's mouth and an instant later, as Horza started to duck and his eyes closed instinctively, the back of Gow's helmet blew out in a single pulse of unseen light, throwing a sudden red cloud over the mossy wall behind. Horza sat down on his haunches, hands closed round the gun barrel in front of him, eyes staring out at the distant jungle. What a mess, he thought, what a fucking, obscene, stupid mess. He hadn't been thinking of what Gow had just done to herself, but he looked round at the red stain on the angled wall and the collapsed shape of Gow's suit, and thought it again. book-quoteThe ship left the construction bay of the factory craft with most of its fitting-out still to be done. Accelerating hard, its course a four-dimensional spiral through a blizzard of stars where it knew that only danger waited, it powered into hyperspace on spent engines from an overhauled craft of one class, watched its birthplace disappear astern with battle-damaged sensors from a second, and tested outdated weapon units cannibalized from yet another. Inside its warship body, in narrow, unlit, unheated, hard-vacuum spaces, constructor drones struggled to install or complete sensors, displacers, field generators, shield disruptors, laserfields, plasma chambers, warhead magazines, maneuvering units, repair systems and the thousands of other major and minor components required to make a functional warship. Gradually, book-quote
