" 'Tonight we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.' The guy who said that was a sergeant who didn't look five years older than me. So if he'd ever killed a man in combat, silently or otherwise, he'd done it as an infant. I already knew eighty ways to kill people, but most of them were pretty noisy." Private Mandella, Chap. 1, p. 3

" 'Now, as the captain said, there'll be only one kind of disciplinary action on maneuvers. Capital punishment. But normally we won't have to kill you for disobeying; Charon'll save us the trouble.' " Private Mandella, Chap. 3, p. 15

" 'All you have to do is lean up against a boulder of frozen gas; there's lots of it around. The gas will sublime off faster than it can escape from the fins; in escaping, it will push against the surrounding 'ice' and fracture it...