Michael D.

“You are always hungry. You get the proper amount of food for a dog your size, plus a bit more, since we’re walking most of the day. See?” I showed him the nutrition label I had torn off the dog chow bag. “It says right here, this is how much you should get.” “Hmm. You are trusting a label, that could have been written by a cat?” “It wasn’t written by a cat.” “Uh huh. Tell me something, since you always do what the label says. The other day, when I watched you eat an entire box of cookies, did the label list twenty four cookies as the serving size?”
― Craig Alanson, Desperate Measures

“Have you ever watched Shark Week? There is always a show about a feeding frenzy, a group of vicious predators who smell blood in the water and go insane with hunger. Those sharks have never seen a dog and a cat tear into a bag of McDonald’s junk food. The cat was at a big disadvantage because as a carnivore, Mister Boots was only interested in the burgers, fish, chicken, and cheese, whereas Duke would eat everything, including parts of the cardboard boxes and wrappers. While the cat picked through the mess to find the items he wanted, Duke used the advanced and more efficient ‘vacuum cleaner’ technique of just inhaling anything he could get into his mouth, figuring his stomach would sort it out later.”
― Craig Alanson, First Strike

“But this? People given a chance to find the truth of their heritage and gifts threatened because they will not simply lie down and die to leave the status quo? “No, Ambassadors. The Royal Martian Navy will not stand by and permit this to happen. If Mage-Queen Kiera herself ordered me to stand down, I would defy that order. Politics and constitution be fucked. “Task Group Twenty-Eight is going to war. While I breathe, those children will not be harmed.”
― Glynn Stewart, The Lies Arcana

“You two can be as conflicted as you want,” he told them, his voice somehow both gentle and iron-hard. “I am the commanding officer of a deployed Task Group of the Royal Martian Navy, responsible for twelve thousand lives and over two hundred Mages. “I am sworn to honor Her Majesty’s oaths and protectorates, and I am sworn to honor the Compact between Mage and Mundane. It is the oath of every Mage that magic will serve humanity, not damn it.” There was a long pause and Connor wondered just what Rantala had been looking at on his own screen. “I may not be a Mage by Right,” Rantala concluded. “But seventeen of my Jump Mages and fifteen of my Combat Mages are, Ambassadors. Necessity meant that I had to bite my tongue and swallow my rage for this mission, even as we entered, and you treated with systems we knew murdered innocents to fuel their starships.”
― Glynn Stewart, The Lies Arcana