Home > Work > Constitution (Legacy Fleet Trilogy, #1)
1 " The old memories were making him angry, boiling up inside of him. That was good. It meant he was still alive. Dead men couldn’t fight. Only living men, fuming at injustice and enraged at the loss of their fellows, fought, and won wars. “Cap’n, "
― Nick Webb , Constitution (Legacy Fleet Trilogy, #1)
2 " A few minutes later his XO appeared, saluting the marine guard as she crossed the threshold to the bridge, which sensibly resided deep within the armored core of the ship rather than being perched precariously on the top of the vessel like an old-style soda can on the fence, ready to be picked off as alien target practice. "
3 " And it was gone—the super-carrier Justice. At least three thousand souls manning its gun crews, engine rooms, half a dozen flightdecks ... all gone in a brilliant, pixelated flash of light. The massive ship fractured into two main pieces, and the aliens, not content with the destruction, blasted the remaining larger half until it too exploded into several dozen smaller pieces. "
4 " Jack Daniels. Damn, she broke out the good stuff for him. "
5 " Wonderful. Save the world, and all it earns you is suspicion and surveillance. Par for the course for IDF, Granger thought, grimly. It was a wonder Earth still existed after not one, but two alien invasions, given the level of rampant bureaucracy and mistrust and general incompetency. But "
6 " Granger bounded towards the command console and tapped the video display showing the priority message received from CENTCOM. A zoomed-in image of Mars appeared, and a handful of grainy-looking ships snapped into orbit, decelerating at incredible speeds. After a brief battle with a handful of defending orbital patrol ships, a harsh white light appeared in the midst of the invading fleet. As the light intensified, the image started to pulse with static. Suddenly, the brilliant light disappeared in a flash. "
7 " And you know why I didn’t get those scans?” He looked back at the blanket-draped figure. “I was scared of dying. Terrified. Didn’t want to face it. Didn’t want to acknowledge it might happen—that I’d be forced to retire, confined to a hospital bed and get bed sores all over my ass. And then, boom. Nothing. No thoughts. No feeling. No existing. Just ... nothing. "
8 " practically "
9 " The young man, barely out of IDF Academy himself, nodded. “Almost complete, sir. No abnormalities from the meta-space sensors, and all the EM frequencies are quiet. The meta-space discrepancy we read earlier must have been a ghost "
10 " Just because something is old, doesn’t mean we need to throw it away. What kind of society have we become, what happens to our values when we say that just because something or someone has been around a hell of a long time that they’ve outlived their usefulness? We become a society of vacant, immature materialists. Moving from one new thing on to the next. Devaluing age and experience.” He was talking about the Constitution, but he couldn’t help but feel like he was talking about himself as well. "
11 " Dead men couldn’t fight. Only living men, fuming at injustice and enraged at the loss of their fellows, fought, and won wars. "
12 " A stray round blasted into her right wing, "
