Space Marine Quotes

If you can read the book and say, ‘Space Marines, YEEEAAAHHH!’ That’s Military Science Fiction.” (Brigham Young writing lecture, March 2012)

Our opportunities to give of ourselves are indeed limitless, but they are also perishable. There are hearts to gladden. There are kind words to say. There are gifts to be given. There are deeds to be done. There are souls to be saved. As we remember that “when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God,” (Mosiah 2:17) we will not find ourselves in the unenviable position of Jacob Marley’s ghost, who spoke to Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s immortal "Christmas Carol." Marley spoke sadly of opportunities lost. Said he: 'Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness. Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!' Marley added: 'Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode? Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me!' Fortunately, as we know, Ebenezer Scrooge changed his life for the better. I love his line, 'I am not the man I was.' Why is Dickens’ "Christmas Carol" so popular? Why is it ever new? I personally feel it is inspired of God. It brings out the best within human nature. It gives hope. It motivates change. We can turn from the paths which would lead us down and, with a song in our hearts, follow a star and walk toward the light. We can quicken our step, bolster our courage, and bask in the sunlight of truth. We can hear more clearly the laughter of little children. We can dry the tear of the weeping. We can comfort the dying by sharing the promise of eternal life. If we lift one weary hand which hangs down, if we bring peace to one struggling soul, if we give as did the Master, we can—by showing the way—become a guiding star for some lost mariner.

Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin did it very well in Utopiques, jeux d'espace [Utopias, play of space]): digest of the American way of life, panegyric of American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. Certainly. But this masks something else and this "ideological" blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.

With his marine clocks, John Harrison tested the waters of space-time. He succeeded, against all odds, in using the fourth—temporal—dimension to link points on the three-dimensional globe. He wrested the world’s whereabouts from the stars, and locked the secret in a pocket watch.

Journalist Sarah Ditum has little time for this argument. 'Come on now,' she chided in a column. 'You've played games as a blue hedgehog. As a cybernetically augmented space marine. As a sodding dragon tager. [...B]ut the idea that women can be protagonists with an inner life and an active nature is somehow beyond your imaginative capacities?

But they are many and he is alone. This has not come to pass yet, he thinks, this is not happening. I am not dying. This is my fate, what shall be. This is the future, it has not happened yet.

I asked myself in the aftermath of the Siege of Terra whether the so-called victory was worth the cost. Now I wonder if we won at all.

In the way that a good wine must be aged, or that we let meat marinate for hours in spices and sauce, an idea must be given space to develop. Rushing into things eliminates that space.

The world goes quiet and warm. I am dying, he thinks, I have failed and there will be nothing left, nothing but ash and hungering darkness. Something within him dims, fluttering to nothing like a flame fading to cold embers. He tries to raise his sword. He is falling… He was… … running the ashes of a dead world through his fingers.

There is a theory that when a planet, like our earth for example, has manifested every form of life, when it has fulfilled itself to the point of exhaustion, it crumbles to bits and is dispersed like star dust throughout the universe. It does not roll on like a dead moon, but explodes, and in the space of a few minutes, there is not a trace of it visible in the heavens. In marine life we have a similar effect. it is called implosion. When an amphibian accustomed to the black depths rises above a certain level, when the pressure to which it adapts itself is lifted, the body bursts inwardly. Are we not familiar with this spectacle in the human being also? The norsemen who went berserk, the malay who runs amuck—are these not examples of implosion and explosion? When the cup is full it runs over. but when the cup and that which it contains are one substance, what then? There are moments when the elixir of life rises to such overbrimming splendor that the soul spills over. In the seraphic smile of the madonnas the soul is seen to flood the psyche. The moon of the face becomes full; the equation is perfect. A minute, a half minute, a second later, the miracle has passed. something intangible, something inexplicable, was given out—and received. In the life of a human being it may happen that the moon never comes to the full. In the life of some human beings it would seem, indeed, that the only mysterious phenomenon observable is that of perpetual eclipse. In the case of those afflicted with genius, whatever the form it may take, we are almost frightened to observe that there is nothing but a continuous waxing and waning of the moon. Rarer still are the anomalous ones who, having come to the full, are so terrified by the wonder of it that they spend the rest of their lives endeavoring to stifle that which gave them birth and being. The war of the mind is the story of the soul-split. When the moon was at full there were those who could not accept the dim death of diminution; they tried to hang full-blown in the zenith of their own heaven. They tried to arrest the action of the law which was manifesting itself through them, through their own birth and death, in fulfillment and transfiguration. Caught between the tides they were sundered; the soul departed the body, leaving the simulacrum of a divided self to fight it out in the mind. Blasted by their own radiance they live forever the futile quest of beauty, truth and harmony. Depossessed of their own effulgence they seek to possess the soul and spirit of those to whom they are attracted. They catch every beam of light; they reflect with every facet of their hungry being. instantly illumined, When the light is directed towards them, they are also speedily extinguished. The more intense the light which is cast upon them the more dazzling—and blinding—they appear. Especially dangerous are they to the radiant ones; it is always towards these bright and inexhaustible luminaries that they are most passionately drawn…

She’s my wife. Back off, jarhead,” he tossed back over his shoulder. Jared laughed, and it wasn’t a mean laugh. Cassie bit back a grin as he stepped back, giving Mitch room to turn around before stepping right back into his personal space. His smile was knowing and totally awesome. “Actually, she’s Cassie. She’s nobody’s wife, because the loser she was married to wasn’t smart enough to know just how awesome his wife was when he had her. So if that’s you, I’m sorry, bud. And I’m guessing it is, because only a moron who’s never served in uniform would call someone a jarhead. You gotta be a Marine to use that term, and only to another Marine. You fail on both points, but try harder next time.

Victory slipped through our fingers the moment Horus chose to reach into the dark and something reached back. We sacrificed our ambitions on the altar of his hubris, and when he fell, he dragged us all down inexorably with him. And not just Horus- Fulgrim as well. And Angron. Magnus. Lorgar. The gods you worship are nothing save lies, hidden behind masks of folklore and superstition. Interdimensional cancers, their mindless hunger confused for sentience amongst the lost and the damned".

Genetically altered to be physically superior to all men, with thousands of years of experience and granted strength by the Ruinous Powers, the Traitor Space Marines were among the most fearsome warriors ever known. The Adeptus Custodes were better.

I can smell the ocean in the distance. The salt wraps around my body, making my skin feel tight, and already I want to shower. I can do big cities, and small cities, and the even the occasional mountaintop is cool. But oceans are ridiculous. They take up way too much space in this overcrowded world and are filled with creatures that have several sets of teeth, like one row of man-eating teeth isn’t enough. And just to add insult to injury, all that water isn’t even drinkable. If you ask me, the ocean is kind of a prick.

That wizard has a lot to fucking answer for,” said Milton.

Luck runs out, Blackmane. Aye. But not today, singer.

Better to accept what you cannot change and learn to adapt than rail against the immutable and end up wasting time and effort.

What empire has ever been anything more than the ruins that are discovered by the one that rises after it? They never last, Khârn. Ever. And neither will this one.

He did not answer, nor did he watch as I left. He was seeing Sigismund again, dwelling on replies he could never speak to a brother he had once admired and who had died despising him.

When, in the fifteenth century, some audacious mariners who had sailed from Europe discovered America, nothing seemed to justify such a venture in the eyes of their contemporaries. Today, however, we can see it has given birth to the twentieth-century United States. Don't you think the existence of the United States constitutes a valid reason for Columbus's wild scheme...

In the way that a good wine must be aged, or that we let meat marinate for hours in spices and sauce, an idea must be given space to develop. Rushing into things eliminates that space. Another

That voice. It couldn’t be. She turned. The Marine. Her brain tried to compute the man before her. The same uncompromising blue-gray eyes, but more distant. The same fit body, but more space filling. The same rugged features, but more bearded. Bearded!

Standing within a peat bog in Dingle, you can’t help wondering what Ireland was like before you and the other primates scrambled up upon its shores. When viewed from space, did it glow like a furry emerald within a sea of blue, the terrestrial equivalent of a massive marine plankton bloom?

That went well," Christina murmured to him. "Pffaww," he agreed. "They're a pair! They don't like anything. They don't even like the dachshund. Who doesn't like dachshunds? They're little parcels of dog-shaped goodness. I've known Jalabite Hegemon ships give up conquest and start little farmsteads just so they can have happy dachshunds. Everyone likes dachshunds, everywhere in the universe. Well, except on Bithomorency. People there got into a war with a refugee column of evolutionarily advanced dachshund supersoldiers fleeing the destruction of their homeworld. The wire-haired marines took out an entire town - two hundred thousand dead. And it was a tragic misunderstanding. The dachshunds only stopped to ask for some biscuits, automated defence systems fired on them. There's a lesson: never give control of your space weapons to an unsupervised machine." He shrugged, and she found herself nodding: schoolboy error.

When I describe for my far-away friends the Northwest’s subtle shades of weather — from gloaming skies of ‘high-gray’ to ‘low-gray’ with violet streaks like the water’s delicate aura — they wonder if my brain and body have, indeed, become water-logged. Yet still, I find myself praising the solace and privacy of fine, silver drizzle, the comforting cloaks of salt, mold, moss, and fog, the secretive shelter of cedar and clouds. Whether it’s in the Florida Keys, along the rocky Maine coast, within the Gulf of Mexico’s warm curves, on the brave Outer Banks; or, for those who nestle near inland seas, such as the brine-steeped Great Salk Lake or the Midwest’s Great Lakes — water is alive and in relationship with those of us who are blessed with such a world-shaping, yet abiding, intimate ally. Every day I am moved by the double life of water — her power and her humility. But most of all, I am grateful for the partnership of this great body of inland sea. Living by water, I am never alone. Just as water has sculpted soil and canyon, it also molds my own living space, and every story I tell. …Living by water restores my sense of balance and natural rhythm — the ebb and flow of high tides and low tides, so like the rise and fall of everyday life. Wind, water, waves are not simply a backdrop to my life, they are steady companions. And that is the grace, the gift of inviting nature to live inside my home. Like a Chambered Nautilus I spin out my days, drifting and dreaming, nurtured by marine mists, like another bright shell on the beach, balancing on the back of a greater body.

This has just came in from high command.  There will be no loitering on the beachhead.  Anyone found skinny dipping or fishing with grenades will be put on a charge.  Two marines have already been disciplined for this offence.’  A few men laughed and he smiled.  ‘Also there will be no fraternisation with the local female populace.  This will not be tolerated.  High command believe they may well carry some exotic disease our doctors may not be able to treat.’  That brought a little more laughter.  ‘Again two marines have already been disciplined,’ the rest of his sentence was drowned out by the laughter.  He waited until it died down again.  ‘In their defence the marines stated that the females plied them with a local beverage made from coconuts.  As there doesn’t seem to be any coconut trees in space the high command disbelieved their story.  So don’t try it, you won’t get away with it.

...fossil fuels are forms of energy in which great quantities of space and time, as it were, have been compressed into a concentrated form. One way of envisioning this compression is to consider that a single litre of petrol used today needed about twenty-five metric tons of ancient marine life as precursor material, or that organic matter equivalent to all of the plant and animal life produced over the entire earth for four hundred years was required to produce the fossil fuels we burn today in a single year.

We got to see a Corsair ship up close – all matt black, no markings, no lights – and practically invisible out here in the dark! What a sight to behold! Most people don’t get to see those bastards up close. That is, for very long! Anyways, the ship was just floating there, no sign of life. Our hails weren’t being answered, and so we assumed the ship was dead in space. Captain Mulligan, gods-rest-his-soul, told me to form a boarding party of security and medics from the sickbay and that we were going over there. We weren’t a military ship, and we’re not Star Marines, so we were lightly armed and quite nervous. I mean, this wasn’t just some of my security section being called out to break up a fight at one of the bars on the promenade, this was serious life-and-death shit! So I said ‘okay’, and told my assistant supervisor, Lisa Garfner, to get them all together. Seven of us shifted over to the other ship with the transmatter (you still use those things, I take it?) not knowing what to expect. It could’ve been anything… and it was. It was crazy.

Ferrying Across is like crossing the sea. When you traverse a strait or make a long crossing of the sea, for a distance of even forty or fifty ri, you use "ferrying." In passing through this human world, too, there are likely many places within the space of a generation that may be called Ferrying Across. On a ship's course, you know where these places are, you know the capacity of the ship and you know the weather patterns well. Though other ships may not venture out, you do so by responding to the conditions of the hour, relying on either a crosswind or a tail wind and, if the wind changes, putting in the oars for two or three ri. With your mind set on arriving at port, you board the ship and ferry across You should think in terms of Ferrying Across when you pass through society and set your mind on some serious affair. For the martial arts, Ferrying Across is essential even in the midst of battle. Here you take into account the level of your opponent, judge your own degree of expertise, and, using the principles of the martial arts, ferry across. It is the same for a good mariner ferrying across a sea route.

Sometimes, I consider whether the Emperor hated the Primarchs the way Fulgrim hates us." "Speak for yourself. Our father does not hate us." "Of course he does. From afar, you feel the lie of his warmth, the false affection you all so urgently crave. And he gives it to you but always from pity. You are his champion, yet still you cannot see it. You will never be as close to him as I was. You never see the way he really looks at us. Never seeing the wonders we wrought, only the limitations. Not our triumphs, just our flaws. He hates us, Lucius, because to Fulgrim, we are not his sons. We are a mirror, holding up an image before him that he can never do anything other than hate. We are his own failure made manifest, the miscarriage that comes about when a father tries to mould his children into something better than himself.

Queen Anne of England established the Longitude Act in 1714, and offered a monetary prize of over a million in today’s dollars to anyone who invented a method to accurately calculate longitude at sea. Longitude is about determining one’s point in space. So one might ask what it has to do with clocks? Mathematically speaking, space (distance) is the child of time and speed (distance equals time multiplied by speed). Thus, anything that moves at a constant speed can be used to calculate distance, provided one knows for how long it has been moving. Many things have constant speeds, including light, sound, and the rotation of the Earth. Your brain uses the near constancy of the speed of sound to calculate where sounds are coming from. As we have seen, you know someone is to your left or right because the sound of her voice takes approximately 0.6 milliseconds to travel from your left to your right ear. Using the delays it takes any given sound to arrive to your left and right ears allows the brain to figure out if the voice is coming directly from the left, the right, or somewhere in between. The Earth is rotating at a constant speed—one that results in a full rotation (360 degrees) every 24 hours. Thus there is a direct correspondence between degrees of longitude and time. Knowing how much time has elapsed is equivalent to knowing how much the Earth has turned: if you sit and read this book for one hour (1/24 of a day), the Earth has rotated 15 degrees (360/24). Thus, if you are sitting in the middle of the ocean at local noon, and you know it is 16:00 in Greenwich, then you are “4 hours from Greenwich”—exactly 60 degrees longitude from Greenwich. Problem solved. All one needs is a really good marine chronometer. The greatest minds of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could not overlook the longitude problem: Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal, Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens, Gottfried Leibniz, and Isaac Newton all devoted their attention to it. In the end, however, it was not a great scientist but one of the world’s foremost craftsman who ultimately was awarded the Longitude Prize. John Harrison (1693–1776) was a self-educated clockmaker who took obsessive dedication to the extreme.

Tim Tigner began his career in Soviet Counterintelligence with the US Army Special Forces, the Green Berets. That was back in the Cold War days when, “We learned Russian so you didn't have to,” something he did at the Presidio of Monterey alongside Recon Marines and Navy SEALs. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tim switched from espionage to arbitrage. Armed with a Wharton MBA rather than a Colt M16, he moved to Moscow in the midst of Perestroika. There, he led prominent multinational medical companies, worked with cosmonauts on the MIR Space Station (from Earth, alas), chaired the Association of International Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, and helped write Russia’s first law on healthcare. Moving to Brussels during the formation of the EU, Tim ran Europe, Middle East, and Africa for a Johnson & Johnson company and traveled like a character in a Robert Ludlum novel. He eventually landed in Silicon Valley, where he launched new medical technologies as a startup CEO. In his free time, Tim has climbed the peaks of Mount Olympus, hang glided from the cliffs of Rio de Janeiro, and ballooned over Belgium. He earned scuba certification in Turkey, learned to ski in Slovenia, and ran the Serengeti with a Maasai warrior. He acted on stage in Portugal, taught negotiations in Germany, and chaired a healthcare conference in Holland. Tim studied psychology in France, radiology in England, and philosophy in Greece. He has enjoyed ballet at the Bolshoi, the opera on Lake Como, and the symphony in Vienna. He’s been a marathoner, paratrooper, triathlete, and yogi.  Intent on combining his creativity with his experience, Tim began writing thrillers in 1996 from an apartment overlooking Moscow’s Gorky Park. Decades later, his passion for creative writing continues to grow every day. His home office now overlooks a vineyard in Northern California, where he lives with his wife Elena and their two daughters. Tim grew up in the Midwest, and graduated from Hanover College with a BA in Philosophy and Mathematics. After military service and work as a financial analyst and foreign-exchange trader, he earned an MBA in Finance and an MA in International Studies from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton and Lauder Schools.  Thank you for taking the time to read about the author. Tim is most grateful for his loyal fans, and loves to correspond with readers like you. You are welcome to reach him directly at tim@timtigner.com.

Usually, Shakespeare gives me goose bumps. The guy knows everything. Like some ancient angel quill-ing out blueprints life. Hiding it in fiction. And usually I love the sound of the words, the way they dance on the page. Today, they fall flat. My attention bobbing in the cosmos. All free brain-space is marinating in gap month fizz. I chew my pen, candy-cane style. The million possibilities ahead make it hard to care about right now. I write my answers slowly, each letter carved in stone not ballpoint. I’m going to explore the world, find my passion, try everything! The fizz shoots up my spine and a smile sprouts.

They raise us up and call us sisters and brothers then let us fall into ourselves. And in our dissolution their superiority is magnified and made manifest.

sure, and they had to push forward.

With one minute to spare, Madison arrived at the Space Needle. Her rose was hastily clipped into her short dark hair. Her cheeks were red from all of the mad rushing around. But she had made it on time. So had Jeremy. Once again he was waiting by the elevator that rode up to the top of the Space Needle. A somewhat faded blue carnation was pinned to the lapel of his jacket. Madison, who usually overplanned everything, hadn’t taken one second to plan what she would say when she finally met “Blue” face-to-face. A man with a bouquet of balloons passed by, and she ducked out of sight behind them. As she ran alongside the vendor, she hastily tried to collect her thoughts. So much was riding on this meeting, and she didn’t want to blow it. When the balloon man got close to the elevator tower, Madison jumped out from behind the balloons and hid by a corner of the tower. Her mind was still a complete blank. But she couldn’t leave Jeremy standing there for another minute. So she inched her way along the wall until she was safely hidden behind the post he was leaning against. Madison checked the TechnoMarine watch she’d borrowed from Piper. It was nearly five minutes after four. Time was running out! She had to say something. But what? Barely a foot away, she heard Jeremy exhale in frustration, and her heart sank. When he made a move to leave, her hand shot out from behind the pillar and caught hold of his. “Blue?” she whispered. “Please don’t turn around.” Jeremy didn’t move. “Okay,” he said warily. “I’m trying to find the words to tell you what our letters have meant to me,” she whispered. “And how much your friendship means to me.” Jeremy nodded. “It’s been important to me, too.” He started to turn around, but Madison tugged his arm, hard. “Don’t look, yet. Please!” Jeremy quickly turned his head away. “All right, but--” Madison didn’t let him finish. She squeezed her eyes shut and started babbling. “I didn’t know who you were until last Friday--which, incidentally, turned out to be about the most important day of my life. And when I knew it was you, I just didn’t know how to tell you that I was me. You once told me I was cold and heartless, and I just couldn’t bear it if you said it again. Everything has been so perfect, I just don’t want to blow it, and now that we’re standing here holding hands, I don’t want to let go--” “So don’t,” a voice whispered, very close to her cheek.

Thing to know about the Reaches....It’s always trying to kill you. Even the empty places between the stars." Asher Corsair, Allies and Enemies: Rogues

The promise of mutually assured destruction had a way of calming even the fiercest hearts.

He remembered being blinded by his father's light. He remembered refusing to abandon his brothers and sisters, beneath a blue sky at high-sun, far from the city of Desh'ea. He remembered the mechanical thunder of absolute betrayal, when he was stolen from the death he'd so richly earned. He remembered the cold moment of truth as he stood in the dark, his hurting eyes healing, that every day he breathed was an unwanted gift. He was walking another man's destiny now. His destiny was to be with the men and women who needed him, who called for him, who followed him into the mountains, and died without him. A destiny denied. He was Angron of Desh'ea. After that, nothing mattered. He'd listened to the others that begged him, that needed it all to matter. He'd played their games, living another man's life. He'd led his fleets, he'd embraced his sons, he'd told himself that blood was thicker than water, and that the Eaters of Worlds were the army he wanted and the horde he deserved. He'd sustained himself on lies, letting none see how he starved. And he served in his cold-hearted father's empire, enduring the silent sneers of brothers he despised.

The only way to kill me was to welcome his own death, and he did it the moment the chance arose.

This Imperium is ours. We fought for it. We built it with blood and sweat and wrath. We forged it with the worlds we took. The empire is built upon foundations of our brothers' bones...We didn't rebel out of petty spite, Sigismund. We rebelled because our Lord and master played us false. We were useful tools to bring the galaxy to heel, but He would have cleansed us from the Imperium the way He purged the Thunder Legion before us, wiping us all from history like excrement from His golden boots.

Come on now,’ she chided in a column. ‘You’ve played games as a blue hedgehog. As a cybernetically augmented space marine. As a sodding dragon-tamer. [. . .B]ut the idea that women can be protagonists with an inner life and an active nature is somehow beyond your imaginative capacities?

You will not interfere with me? No. Well, I'm glad that's settled. Now I don't have to crack open your skull and claim the eldar did it.

Something vast suddenly crossed my field of vision. By the time I had reacted and adjusted the magnification, it had passed out of sight into the works shed. I had a brief memory of bright, almost gaudy metal and a shimmering, flowing robe. ‘What the hell was that?’ I hissed. Midas looked at me, lowering his scope, actual fear on his face. Fischig also looked disturbed. ‘A giant, a horned giant in jewelled metal,’ Midas said. ‘He came striding out of the modular hab to the left and went straight into the shed. God-Emperor, but it was huge!’ Fischig agreed with a nod. ‘A monster,’ he said. The cones above roared again, and a rain of withering ash fluttered down across the settlement. We shrank back into the thorn-trees. Guard activity seemed to increase. ‘Rosethorn,’ my vox piped. ‘Now is not a good time,’ I hissed. It was Maxilla. He sent one final word and cut off. ‘Sanctum.’ ‘Sanctum’ was a Glossia codeword that I had given Maxilla before we had left the Essene. I wanted him in close orbit, providing us with extraction cover and overhead sensor advantages, but knew that he would have to melt away the moment any other traffic entered the system. ‘Sanctum’ meant that he had detected a ship or ships emerging from the immaterium into realspace, and was withdrawing to a concealment orbit behind the local star. Which meant that all of us on the planet were on our own. Midas caught my sleeve and pointed down at the settlement. The giant had reappeared and stood in plain view at the mouth of the shed. He was well over two metres tall, wrapped in a cloak that seemed to be made of smoke and silk, and his ornately decorated armour and horned helmet were a shocking mixture of chased gold, acidic yellow, glossy purple, and the red of fresh, oxygenated blood. In his ancient armour, the monster looked like he had stood immobile in that spot for a thousand years. Just a glance at him inspired terror and revulsion, involuntary feelings of dread that I could barely repress. A Space Marine, from the corrupted and damned Adeptus Astartes. A Chaos Marine.

Our main problem over the past few days and weeks,’ he said, ‘has lain in trying to connect the various phenomena. In fact, there wasn’t any obvious connection until a jelly-like substance started to crop up. Sometimes it appeared in small quantities, sometimes in larger amounts, but always with the distinguishing characteristic that it disintegrated rapidly on contact with air. Unfortunately the discovery of the jelly only added to the mystery, given its presence in crustaceans, mussels and whales - three types of organism that could hardly be more different. Of course, it might have been some kind of fungus, a jellified version of rabies, an infectious disease like BSE or swine fever. But, if so, why would ships be disappearing or crabs transporting killer algae? There was no sign of the jelly on the worms that infested the slope. They were carrying a different kind of cargo - bacteria that break down hydrates and cause methane gas to rise. Hence the landslide and the tsunami. And what about the mutated species that have been emerging all over the world? Even fish have been behaving oddly. None of it adds up. In that respect, Jack Vanderbilt was right to discern an intelligent mind behind the chaos. But he overestimated our ability - no scientist knows anything like enough about marine ecology to be capable of manipulating it to that extent. People are fond of saying that we know more about space than we do about the oceans. It’s perfectly true, but there’s a simple reason why: we can’t see or move as well in the water as we can in outer space. The Hubble telescope peers effortlessly into different galaxies, but the world’s strongest floodlight only illuminates a dozen square metres of seabed. An astronaut in a spacesuit can move with almost total freedom, but even the most sophisticated divesuit won’t stop you being crushed to death beyond a certain depth. AUVs and ROVs are only operational if the conditions are right. We don’t have the physical constitution or the technology to deposit billions of worms on underwater hydrates, let alone the requisite knowledge to engineer them for a habitat that we barely understand. Besides, there are all the other phenomena: deep-sea cables being destroyed at the bottom of the ocean by forces other than the underwater slide; plagues of jellyfish and mussels rising from the abyssal plains. The simplest explanation would be to see these developments as part of a plan, but such a plan could only be the work of a species that knows the ocean as intimately as we do the land - a species that lives in the depths and plays the dominant role in that particular universe.

Jaghatai started to cough, sending more bloody spurts out over the ripped-apart ground. His shattered gauntlet still clutched the hilt of his blade, but the arm must have been broken in many places. Only slowly, as he trudged back, did Mortarion realise that the sound was bitter laughter. 'I… absorbed,' Jaghatai rasped, 'the… pain.' Mortarion halted. 'What do you mean?' 'I… know,' Jaghatai said, his voice a liquid slur. 'The Terminus Est. You… gave up. I… did not.' And then he grinned – his split lips, his flayed cheeks, his lone seeing eye, twisting into genuine, spiteful pleasure. 'My endurance is… superior.' So that was what they all believed. Not that he had done what needed to be done. Not that he had sacrificed everything to make his Legion invincible, even suffering the ignominy of using Calas as his foil, even condemning himself to the permanent soul-anguish of daemonhood so that the change could never be undone by anyone, not even his father. That he had been weak.

The Great Barrier Reef is so extensive that no human mind can take it in, the exception perhaps being astronauts who've seen its full length from outer space. Gigantism pervades its statistics. Roughly half the size of Texas, it encloses some 215,000 square miles of coastland, sea, and coral. It extends for about 1,430 miles along Australia's east coast, and encompasses around three thousand individual reefs and a thousand islands. So vast is it, in fact, that it's only since the 1970s, with the establishment of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, that a size has been more or less agreed upon. Prior to that, explorers and navigators gave varying figures for its length.

. . . most humans were not so good at grasping aspects of nature that couldn't be clearly defined or placed into hierarchies, even though nature's products were 'seldom organized into species at all.' Now [Charlie Vernon] saw that, considered over vast geographical space and long swathes of geological time, coral species were malleable and temporary units, fluidly interlinked by their genes to other units, and forming ever-changing patterns. Corals had to be treated as continua, not as fixed, isolated units.

You fall, you rise, you continue on, refusing to believe your failures until once more they strike you down. You return, slowly diminishing, but unwilling to stop, unwilling to succumb. You are your race, Lucius. You are humanity and as with the rest of your kind, I delight in your dance, all the way to its end.

There was no unity to their attack. These were not wolves, pack animals that coordinated to dominate a larger prey. They were mercenaries, single fighters who relied on their skills with a blade and nothing - and no one - else. Had they struck him in concert, the Incubi might have pushed Lucius to the brink of defeat, or at least driven him away from their charge. They were exemplary, their craft honed to a brilliant edge, and fast as quicksilver. United, they would have been a terrible foe. As individuals, they were an amusing challenge, but nothing more. It last seven clashes before the first Eldar fell. The alien crashed to the deck, trying in vain to stymie the slopping discharge of his guts with arms that no longer had hands. Decreased by a third, the potency of the other two visibly diminished. Lucius could focus a greater share of his murderous attention on each of them, reducing their chances of survival from slim to non-existent. The second would die screaming, eventually, as Lucius crushed him in the grip of his lash and pitched him into the abyss. The third paused, shoulders heaving with exertion, before leaping at Lucius, its silver glaive flashing high. The Eldar came crashing down before the Eternal, blood spurting from the stump where its head had been moments before.

Tell me, because I really am quite curious. What precisely did you expect to happen when my dear perfidious brother brought me here? Did you truly believe I would be content to serve out the rest of my days as your sport? Did you truly believe I would not kill every single one of you, and hurl this satellite into your little cesspool of a city? You have no idea what you have unleashed upon yourself. I relish death. It holds no power over me, Eldar, because it holds no mystery. I have drunk from the well of oblivion time and again. I have bathed in chemical fire within the shattering bones of a warship as its reactor split and gave birth to a momentary star. I have felt the edge of fourteen blades as they sundered my hearts. I have drowned at the bottom of a world of endless ocean. I have tasted the most potent poisons this reality and the ones beyond can produce. I have been executed, assassinated, pulverised and ground to mulch. Yet here I stand. Against the very forces that set and order reality, here I stand. Unbowed. Undefeated. Eternal. What can you possibly offer, to threaten me?

Soldiers,' he made an insult of the word. 'Once we were crusaders Khayon, and now we're warriors, but we were never soldiers. Keep that foolishness to yourself.' I swallowed my argument, following his train of thought. It was not the first time legionaries have disagreed over those semantics, and it would be far from the last. Some believed soldiering came down to discipline, or fighting for a state or a leader rather than for yourself. Some believed warriorhood was a matter of heart that elevated them above a soldier's station, while others considered it a state of barbarity that dragged them beneath it. Some questions have no answers. No matter how seriously we took warfare, no matter how adamantly we clung to our disciplined roots as a Space Marine Legion, many of our number were ultimately the raiders and marauders that time had made them. For better or worse, we would never have the ironclad discipline of a Throne-loyal Adeptus Astartes force. Even back then, we had lost much of the discipline we had once possessed as Legions of the Great Crusade.

Simple reason suggested that the Space Marines of the Lystraegonian were, by now, categorically out of the fight. But reason, Oltyx had learned over the course of the Akrops' flight, was near useless as a measure for understanding the actions of humanity,

In my experience, you mon-keigh make a great many claims when it comes to your own prowess, awarding yourselves title after title, your psyches awash with the hope that such posturing will intimidate your foes." "Undeniably true, though that seems harsh criticism from a species that attaches poetic nonsense like" The Storm of Silence" and "The Cry of the Wind" to its demigods, no?

You know as well as I that this doesn’t end with kill teams or assassins or a pre-emptive strike thousands of light years from Terra. It ends with me looking into my father’s eyes, my hands around His neck, and showing Him everything he loves burned to ash by His lies.

The day will come, my dear, when your children's children stride the galactic rim as the kings and queens of all they survey. But first, you — we — must teach them how to survive, until that moment. In your generation, there were five hundred. Of them all, I kept only you and your closest siblings. The rest are scattered across the galaxy, burrowed into the flesh of a dying empire, so that they might best guide it to its well-deserved and long overdue grave. They, and their children, carry on my teachings into the dark. Generation upon generation, their strength breeding true. As mankind dies, so it nurtures its own replacement, all unknowing. But you are different. You and your kin are to be my hand on the throat of the future. For my brothers will not surrender to fate with dignity. Those who remain, after that final hour, will fight one another for the right to rule the ashes. And in that moment, you and yours shall assert yourselves, for the first time and the last. You will hunt angels, in the days to come, and make a new kingdom from their bones". ‘And where will you be?’ she asked softly. Fabius stepped back. ‘I imagine I will be first among the foundations, my dear.’ He smiled thinly. ‘There will be no place for me in the paradise to come.’ He laughed. Behind them, the entrance to the laboratorium whined open, and someone entered. Fabius ignored the newcomer, even as Igori stiffened. ‘But until then, I persist. Until my work is done.

Would you be immortal, Master?' I would live long enough to see my work completed. True immortality is a burden, and I scarcely have need of another of those. Upon my back rests the weight of the future. But all things must end, to have any purpose at all. True beauty is found in beauty's end. A saying our gene-father was fond of, once upon a time. Before he lost sight of things.

The only good is knowledge, Sekhandur. The only evil is ignorance'. 'That is a saying uttered by as many fools as visionaries and an attitude that has led to damnation more than once. The last man to speak those words in my presence doomed our Legion.

For many years, I believed Him to be a god. I was instrumental in spreading the belief myself.' 'You still believe it'. 'I know what I know. A god or not, His power renders Him indistinguishable from divinity'.

Aphasia is a condition in which the occlusion of knowledge is at once a dismembering of words from the objects to which they refer, a difficulty retrieving both the semantic and lexical components of vocabularies, a loss of access that may verge on active dissociation, a difficulty comprehending what is seen and spoken. Colonial aphasia as conceived here is a political condition whose genealogy is embedded in the space that has allowed Marine Le Pen and her broad constituency to move from the margin and extreme—where her father was banished—to a normalized presence in contemporary France. But colonial aphasia is not peculiar to France.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Tim Tigner began his career in Soviet Counterintelligence with the US Army Special Forces, the Green Berets. That was back in the Cold War days when, “We learned Russian so you didn't have to,” something he did at the Presidio of Monterey alongside Recon Marines and Navy SEALs. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tim switched from espionage to arbitrage. Armed with a Wharton MBA rather than a Colt M16, he moved to Moscow in the midst of Perestroika. There, he led prominent multinational medical companies, worked with cosmonauts on the MIR Space Station (from Earth, alas), chaired the Association of International Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, and helped write Russia’s first law on healthcare. Moving to Brussels during the formation of the EU, Tim ran Europe, Middle East and Africa for a Johnson & Johnson company and traveled like a character in a Robert Ludlum novel. He eventually landed in Silicon Valley, where he launched new medical technologies as a startup CEO. In his free time, Tim has climbed the peaks of Mount Olympus, hang glided from the cliffs of Rio de Janeiro, and ballooned over Belgium. He earned scuba certification in Turkey, learned to ski in Slovenia, and ran the Serengeti with a Maasai warrior. He acted on stage in Portugal, taught negotiations in Germany, and chaired a healthcare conference in Holland. Tim studied psychology in France, radiology in England, and philosophy in Greece. He has enjoyed ballet at the Bolshoi, the opera on Lake Como, and the symphony in Vienna. He’s been a marathoner, paratrooper, triathlete, and yogi.

In the Jolan district, on the edge of the Euphrates River, in the northwestern corner of the city, Marines found something far more troubling. Inside a metal-sided warehouse, past the insurgent caches of rocket-propelled grenades and artillery rounds, the Marines discovered a crawl space barricaded with a safe. Pushing it aside, the troops saw an Iraqi man chained hand and foot, lying in his own waste. The virtual skeleton proved to be a still-living taxi driver who’d been abducted four months earlier along with a pair of French journalists—thankfully, he would survive. Down the hall, Marines crashed through another door and found themselves in what appeared to be a ramshackle movie studio. On the table was a glass with ice in it; whoever had left had just done so in a hurry. Nearby, Marines found two video cameras, klieg lights, and instructions on how to get footage to the Baghdad offices of some of the regional news networks. On the back wall of the room hung the black-and-green flag of Ansar al-Islam. The floor was caked in dried blood. The moment I read that last detail in the intelligence report I received, I knew it was the room where Nick Berg had been murdered.

Here Coleridge advances the beautiful suggestive idea that the poetic imagination can hold open for us a shape or a space we have yet to grow into. The great works of art and literature are, as it were, making room for our future insights, giving us the shapes, the stories, the images into which the undeveloped antennae of our inner life can grow.

Spices" The scents of spices are sad whether at home or in foreign lands ... At home, they passes through the nose to give a ray of hope, a breathing space that make us forget – albeit for a short while – all about the chains of religions, gossip, the absurdity of politics, and the cruelty of the ruling classes … At home, spices help us cope with the heavy weight of the backbreaking customs and traditions … You see everyone excited to have a meal that help them forget about the hardships, the crises, and the unsuitability of life at home … In alienating foreign lands, The scent of spices awakens everything that was lost, including the lost lands and homes… There is something unbearably sad about the image of a woman Standing in a kitchen filled with scents of spices reminding her of all that happened, all that was possible, all that should never have happened, and of all the irreplaceable losses … So many are the societies that have been completely destroyed, and of which nothing remains but scents of spices that add flavor to foods and marinate the wounds … Could spices be like old songs? We love them at home because they touch wounds we wish we could heal from, the same old songs break our hearts in foreign lands, because by then we have finally learned that exile doesn’t heal wounds, but rather pushes the knife deeper into them … And like the alienating foreign lands, the scents of spices declare that there is much more to the story of the wound; a story that kills if untold, and doesn’t heal when narrated … [Original poem published in Arabic on December 11, 2023 at ahewar.org]

I will meet the dying Emperor's empty eye sockets and tell him the war is almost over. At last, after ten thousand years of banishment in the Underworld, his fallen angels are coming home...These are the end times. None of you are destined to survive the coming of the Crimson Path. The Imperium has been losing the Long War since it was first declared, and now we enter the endgame. I will tell you everything, Inquisitor, because for you, it will change nothing.

I will give you NOTHING! Shall I tell you what I believe, Thagus?...I believe you are likewise trapped in the storm. I believe the Warp aided your pursuit of us, then cut you adrift in our wake, leaving you becalmed and with no idea why. I believe that the malignant essences we call Gods have brought us together in the heart of this storm to play out a game of kings and pawns, just to see where their favour should fall...I believe, most of all, that you are frightened of us. You fear us because despite your raving speeches that we are betraying the Legions, and despite your petty crusades to destroy us, we not only survive, but THRIVE. We grow with every conflict. The icons of the failed Legions are sheared from ever more suits of armour, and the colours of shame are eclipsed in numbers no other warband can match. You fear that we are right and you are wrong. You fear us, more than any other reason, because you had to chase us. Because we were here first. Because we are the ones on the verge of breaking free, despite all your attempts in these last decades to hinder us. We have been working towards this fate, while you have done nothing but seek to stop us. We've fought for true unity, all brothers beneath the black banner, while you've fought against it in the guise of preserving the old, failed ways. We, Thagus, have acted. You have reacted. And here we stand at our prison's edge. Even now you have no answers to give your men. Instead, you force this meeting with us, praying you can glean insight into our plans and scavenge victory through threats. You'll lose this war, Thagus. You'll lose because you desire the Gods' favour and you fear it falling upon anyone else.

Mortarion was still the greater of them. He was still the stronger, the more steeped in preternatural gifts, but now all that he felt was doubt, rocked by the remorseless fury of one who had never been anything more than flighty, self-regarding and unreliable. All Mortarion could see just then was one who wished to kill him - who would do anything, sacrifice anything, fight himself beyond physical limits, destroy his own body, his own heart, his own soul, just for the satisfaction of the oaths he had made in the void. 'If you know what I did,' Mortarion cried out, fighting on now through that cold fog of indecision, 'then you know the truth of it, brother - I can no longer die.' It was as if a signal had been given. The Khan's bloodied head lifted, the remnants of his long hair hanging in matted clumps. 'Oh, I know that,' he murmured, with the most perfect contempt he had ever mustered. 'But I can.' Then he leapt. His broken legs still propelled him, his fractured arms still bore his blade, his blood-filled lungs and perforated heart still gave him just enough power, and he swept in close. If he had been in the prime of condition, the move might have been hard to counter, but he was already little more than a corpse held together by force of will, and so Silence interposed itself, catching the Khan under his armour-stripped shoulder and impaling him deep. But that didn't stop him. The parry had been seen, planned for, and so he just kept coming, dragging himself up the length of the blade until the scythe jutted out of his ruptured back and the White Tiger was in tight against Mortarion's neck. For an instant, their two faces were right up against one another - both cadaverous now, drained of blood, drained of life, existing only as masks onto pure vengeance. All their majesty was stripped away, scraped out across the utilitarian rockcrete, leaving just the desire, the violence, the brute mechanics of despite. It only took a split second. Mortarion's eyes went wide, realising that he couldn't wrench his brother away in time. The Khan's narrowed. 'And that makes the difference,' Jaghatai spat. He snapped his dao across, severing Mortarion's neck cleanly in an explosion of black bile, before collapsing down into the warp explosion that turned the landing stage, briefly, into the brightest object on the planet after the Emperor's tormented soul itself.

You mean to topple whoever finally claims Terra's throne and take it for yourself." "Who among my brothers is as remotely suited as I for such a position? Horus is already so rank with stolen powers that he burns from the inside out and sees it not. Perturabo might once have had the imagination to make such a leap, but it has been ground out of him. Angron or Mortarion are lords only of corpses and maggots, and as for Konrad and Fulgrim, they are not fit to rule themselves, let alone a galaxy.

The age of exploration has now moved to outer space, and so have its hobgoblins. The sailor in the heavens, like the mariner of old, is harried by the spectre of sailing into a falls — not a water falls at the edge of the earth but a space falls nested in his course as a black hole.

You are not the disease. You are but the symptom. Mankind was on the cusp of greatness, Kasperos, and we yanked it away on the advice of a shared delusion.

Do not play me false, Fabius. I know deceit when I smell it, and the odour grows thick here. If you attempt to cheat me of my destiny, I will rip your ossified spine from your reeking carcass and beat you to death with it.

I am come, finally. The final curtain and the last song. And I will burn this half-world and clothe myself in its ashes before I am done. Children of the Emperor! Death to His foes!

Those things you dote on are no more human than the Neverborn in my flasks. They are golems of meat and muscle, no better than the Interex or the Laer. For all your talk, you have only made monsters. That is why the gods exalt you so... You are a fecund womb for outrages and that pleases them greatly.

The discipline of the Third had once been without equal. Now, it had collapsed entirely, leaving only ambitious barbarism in its wake. Overeager savages scrabbling for influence among the ashes. Grudgingly, he included himself among their number.

We were created to guide mankind into the future. To oversee the birth of a new race. One which will outstrip even our accomplishments. We do not set the fire so that we might rule the ashes, my brothers...no, we set it so that the old might give way before the new. Take comfort, my brothers. It is a battle we cannot lose, for we have already won.

Perhaps I overestimate the intelligence of our species. Perhaps we are little more than psychopathic apes, driven to fashion clubs and smash out the brains of our closest neighbours.

I am Arsaces, Saha of the - I know who you are. You are a shadow of great warriors past. A mongrel, made out of battlefield leavings. Do not sully this moment by pretending to have a name that is worth remembering. Because I surely will not, come tomorrow.

The gods love you, Fabius. You delivered a Legion to them. You opened the door with your twisted ingenuity, in ways Erebus could not conceive. And you are still opening that door, every time your scalpel draws a red line across flesh. The universe is made of two parts--a knife and a stone. If you do not wield the one, you must lay upon the other. And you wield the knife very well indeed.

Why do you follow him? What can he offer you? Knowledge, child. There is no keener mind in the galaxy than that sour chunk of meat that occupies his skull. He has forgotten more about the inner workings of man and xenos alike than any Apothecary has ever known. I came to him to learn how to craft new and better contagions, so that Grandfather's blessings might be shared more freely. There are secret plagues from Old Night in these containers and virulent infections culled from crumbling bones of long dead aeldari. And with these raw materials and his aid, I have made wonders and horrors undreamt of by even the most glopsome of my brothers. Plagues that would devour even the rubbery flesh of Grandfather's children... Daemons are not susceptible to mortal plagues. No, they are not. And yet I have seen the results myself. That is what he offers me, child. In his shadow, I grow pleasingly feculent. And what does he get out of it? Were you not listening? Plagues, child. Swift plagues that can ravage entire systems at impossible rates. Oh, his mind is a thing of broken beauty. Even Abaddon cannot conceive of genocide on such a scale - it is not war to our Chief Apothecary, but simply...pest control. Imagine it. A great silence, falling all at once across a system. A sector. Every imperfect thing, snuffed out like a candle flame. And then... Ah, and then, a new beginning.

Do you remember Prospero? The world? Yes. When Russ and his curs burned it, a wealth of knowledge unequalled in the galaxy burned with it. I have always held that Magnus's greatest sin was not what he did to his sons or to his world, but that he allowed the Space Wolves to erase all that wisdom from the universe.

The galaxy was in flames and crowded with pyromaniacs eager to claim possession of the ashes. Bile had no interest in the conflagration, its cause or celebrants. Let the galaxy burn. From its ashes would rise a new future. One created by him.

Vili raised an eyebrow to encourage her to say more. “That’s it? Aesir Sif leads us to a super top-secret SOG station in the heart of SOG space next to the most powerful fleet in the galaxy where we’ll assault it against unknown odds to discover what they’re doing, then we’re supposed to escape and bring that information home?

I do not doubt your visions. But what do they change? Shall we stare up at the shadows and let our blades fall from our hands? Know this, son of Magnus. There is more under the arch of heaven than victory or defeat. We may fall back but not forever. We may feint and we may weave, but not forever. We may yet be doomed to lose all that we cherish, but we shall do so in the knowledge that we could have turned away, and did not. We remained true. They can never have this, not if they burn all we built and scorn us through the dancing flames. You hear me? We remained true.

There is nowhere left to hide. We know you now. We shall hunt you in every plane of reality. We will cleanse the void, then we will cleanse the warp. So look on me now, yaksha, and know your slayer.

There is a mystical quality to the place where sea meets land, the clashing of two very different worlds. Yet continuity remains between them. The oceans reclaim the earth with their wind and water. The earth soaks up the sea to be carried off by the rain. They are always in flux. Each has their specific creatures, breathing in their own given ways, but dying in the same way, caught in a constant battle to survive. They swim and run and fly in tranquil spaces, among rolling hills and waves, great blue and green expanses, mountains both below the surface and above. And there is violence in their worlds.

A plug for the quantitative sciences: The reality is, most humans manage to feed, clothe, and amuse themselves, and yet are not able to formulate a rational argument that stands up to informed scrutiny, derive the conclusion of a syllogistic argument, or understand a mathematical proof. Doing advanced studies in any quantitative field is like surviving Marine boot camp while the rest of the world is channel surfing and inhaling Oreos; you don’t exactly need to fear the push-up test. Even when the intellectual test is being doled out as filter to the elite ranks of a globe-spanning tech company, you won’t be out of your league if you understand the problem space. So if nothing else, aspiring physicist or mathematician, rest comfortable knowing you’ll come out of that long academic tunnel thinking circles around most people.

plug for the quantitative sciences: The reality is, most humans manage to feed, clothe, and amuse themselves, and yet are not able to formulate a rational argument that stands up to informed scrutiny, derive the conclusion of a syllogistic argument, or understand a mathematical proof. Doing advanced studies in any quantitative field is like surviving Marine boot camp while the rest of the world is channel surfing and inhaling Oreos; you don’t exactly need to fear the push-up test. Even when the intellectual test is being doled out as filter to the elite ranks of a globe-spanning tech company, you won’t be out of your league if you understand the problem space. So if nothing else, aspiring physicist or mathematician, rest comfortable knowing you’ll come out of that long academic tunnel thinking circles around most people. For

While human spaceflight is certainly compelling – and it has always been a big part of my reporting career -- there is something about unmanned robotic spacecraft that has always tugged at my heart. These machines are our emissaries out into the cosmos, flung to faraway places that humans can’t yet visit. I grew up hearing about spacecraft like Mariner, Viking and Voyager boldly going on some of the first-ever deep space missions and making monumental discoveries that changed our view of the Solar System. They showed us worlds we previously could only dream about and artists could only imagine.

The life of a space mariner was one filled with superstition and ritual: they clung with nigh religious fervour to anything that might belay such bad luck.

Yes, yes, I was thinking. This is the way to live, perfect for my short attention span. I could easily imagine doing this with chef friends in New York, ricocheting from tapas bar to tapas bar, drinking and eating and eating and drinking, terrorizing one place after another. If only New York had an entire neighborhood of tapas bars. The whole idea of the poteo wouldn't work if you had to take a cab from place to place. And the idea of sitting down at a table for pinchos, having to endure a waiter, napkins, a prolonged experience, seems all wrong. Another joint, then another, the red wine flowing, the girls getting looser and louder. I don't know how one would translate 'Uh-oh, here comes trouble' but I'm sure we heard it in our rounds as our crew swept into one tiny bar after another. I remember anchovies marinated in olive oil, tomato, onion, and parsley, cured anchovies, grilled anchovies, fried sardines, a festival of small tasty fish. More wine, more toasts. I recall stumbling through an old square that had once been a city bullring, apartments now overlooking the empty space. Past old churches, up cobblestone steps, down others, lost in a whirlwind of food.

The marines have their own mess and their own sleeping space, forming a community of their own.