It used to be, by my predecessorsâ memoirs, that you could almost feel good about taking a slave ship. Kill the slavers, free the prisoners from the slave-holds and explosive collars, ferry them back to their homes, and chase down the next one; a good month. Those were more innocent
Landfill Beyond The Stars: No, just no. Itâs hard to imagine the economics that would make it possible to haul junk across space for dumping. And that would make it worthwhile to waste an entire planet to store the stuff. But⌠âŚthere are a couple of locations that specialize
âYes, the Ley Accords do consider using ecocidal weapons on garden worlds a more serious issue than the self-genocidal use of strategic nucleonic weapons. Â Thatâs because, in the big picture, the sort of chumps who nuke themselves to death are rather less valuable to the galaxy than the ecosystem
Deployable Cover: For this purpose â and assuming that people are firing material objects at you, which is, in fairness, most of the time â they do make portable kinetic barriers. (Donât try and use them while youâre still carrying them, though. All that kinetic energy has to go somewhere,
âDrop shuttle (n.): An armored crate flown by a maniac.â â The Unofficial Guide To The IN Flying a drop shuttle is a unique sort of piloting. Youâre always deploying under combat conditions, and often before youâve established orbital superiority, so people are shooting at you from the moment
Democracy Is Bad: This is the Imperial consensus view. Partly for the fairly obvious reason that in democracies like ours, where just about everything or everything minus a small list is up for grabs by vote, itâs just a tyranny with more tyrants. (See, thus, the Drowning of the
One week earlier, somewhere in the Gal-kiderax System, Theomachy of Galia. âIâd kill a soph in a fair fight.â The black-cloaked figure paced in circles, long stride carrying him from wall to wall. âHells, even before I left my dear stuffy cousins behind, Iâd kill a soph in
Defictionalization: My terrific taste for metafiction aside, this also happens in-world, quite a bit. Most notable, perhaps, is the incident (see: Stranger Than Fiction) in which the protagonist species from the virtuality game (novel, InVid, watchvid, and slinky) An Ending Not In Fire, the temĂsi, arthĂĄl, and zal!en were
âIt is ridiculous, and near-slanderous, to suggest that âfree traderâ is synonymous with âsmugglerâ! Why, I can guarantee that over fifty percent of voyages made by our members involve no illicit or even borderline-illicit cargoes at all.â âYouâre counting the inward legs separately, arenât you?â âThatâs beside
Defcon Five: Three of these systems, actually. The Admiralty has its âstrategic conditionâ levels, in both global and theater senses, ranging from Six (âall is peaceful, quiet, tranquil, and frankly boringâ) to One (âfull-blown war, or, if this is the global level, galactic armageddonâ). Likewise, the Emergency Management Authority has
Deface of the Moon: Monuments are by far the commonest type of this; with small moons, even, sometimes, although far more common are things like carved mountains. (The minor range to the âeastâ of Calmirie is the classic example, slowly being carved one mountain at a time into likenesses of
Decorative Apostrophe: Theyâre not decorative. Nor are the other accents. The acute indicates a long vowel; the diaeresis indicates, as it does in other languages, that two vowels are pronounced separately, and an apostrophe, found trailing a vowel with a diaeresis, indicates that that vowel is both long and