space-opera

People gravitated here for the open air, the prolific intoxicants and the visual treats. They made the deals here that were later played out elsewhere. They drank and got high. Sometimes they fought, not for money but for sport or grudge.They were the desperate and the daring, the lost and the searching. Tonight, they were his audience. Tomorrow, they would be his front line.

She and Kennedy both dove for the power connector; Kennedy reached it first and yanked out the connection as Alex landed on her stomach beside it.The air settled down until the fine hairs on her arm no longer stood on end. Alex dropped her forehead to the platform and started laughing. __ust like university, isn__ it?___lmost__othing__ actually blown up yet.

In the corner of her eye she caught her daughter__ shoulders drop as Alex exhaled with uncommon soberness. __o you trust me, and you understand that I will never do anything I think might hurt you.__iriam stopped outside the armory and pivoted to her daughter. __lex, what have you done?

His vision blurred, his grip on the dash faltered and the cockpit lost definition. Then all the diati rushed back to him in its own shockwave.The physical force slammed him against the cockpit half-wall. He gasped air into his lungs as a crimson aura throbbed above his skin. The world spun around him, and it occurred to him if he wanted to he could control it__ot the spinning, but the world.

I can feel my face growing warm, and I hope I'm not flushing in my terror. The feeling of helplessness and fear hits me hard, and once my mind validates the emotion, the physical fear of being maimed and eaten hits my skin as goose bumps in the heat.

She was born of space. And starlight. But she bled wrath. And vengeance.."[From Current Work In Progress]

You__e not going to fight me, Captain. This is the right call. You know it.__he marched me off the bridge and into the brilliant white passageway. __ou think I__ just going to trust you__l let me go?_ I asked, getting a painful nudge in the back.__ou don__ have a choice._ She was right about that. __elax. I got your back, Cale.___ou__e got a pistol in my back is what you__e got.___ust like old times.__rust her? Well, shit.

When I think of war, I see blood. Pain and suffering. Nothing good comes from war.But there is good. There will be an outcome. One side will find peace, solace. While the other will end in bitter loss.There are two sides to the coin of war.

The fire crackled. On Jutaire, without oxygen, the fire is different. Fed by different air. Maybe it wishes it were orange, for it sputters and reaches up to the sky with angry fists of blue and purple. It still doesn't know we can't all get what we want.

You win the Game,_ Vitas says. His features obscured under the long black robe, regal-like modesty against our animalistic near nudity._ Ant Ryan, Celestial Spheres

Sometimes we need to step away from our current reality in order to truly appreciate it.

Don't go getting offended my friend, I have much worse things to say to you.-Ad'Dam, Journey from Atremes

Space opera, as every reader doubtless knows, is a pejorative term often applied to a story that has an element of adventure. Over the decades, brilliant and talented new writers appear, receiving great acclaim, and each and every one of them can be expected to write at least one article stating flatly that the day of space opera is over and done, thank goodness, and that henceforth these crude tales of interplanetary nonsense will be replaced by whatever type of story that writer happens to favor _ closet dramas, psychological dramas, sex dramas, etc., but by God important dramas, containing nothing but Big Thinks. Ten years late, the writer in question may or may not still be around, but the space opera can be found right where it always was, sturdily driving its dark trade in heroes.

It is an edged cliché that the world is most pleasant in the years of a Waning Sun. It is true that the weather is not so driven, that everywhere there is a sense of slowing down, and most places experience a few years where the summers do not burn and the winters are not yet overly fierce. It is the classic time of romance. It's a time that seductively beckons higher creatures to relax, postpone. It's the last chance to prepare for the end of the world.

You daughter is prudish?_ There was a gleam of triumph in Helena Winter__ face. Fee grimaced. Prudish? No, not that she could claim. Far too mild a word for what she felt.

Follow the plan until it goes to shit, and then kill everything that isn__ human.

It all goes aroundIt all goes aroundThe planet goes around the sunIt all goes aroundMy mother said it all goes aroundIt all goes aroundThe ship goes around the station

Personally, I could care less about how people chose their graves. What I do care about is that I don__ want to be dragged along into one, especially by someone who has already lived their life to the fullest.