How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
"Those are people," said Brawne Lamia, pointing toward the main terminal gates. […] A wave of drab colors crashed like a silent surf against the outer fence and the violet containment field. (2.10)
These people were fine with being neighbors to the Shrike, a merciless killing machine, but now that war is coming they all of a sudden they want to leave. Strange priorities.
Quote #2
Kassad's adrenaline was flowing and the bloodlust had him in its grip. (2.208)
This is one of many quotes in which we're not sure if Kassad is going into battle or making love. (This time, it's battle.) What's similar about warfare and sex?
Quote #3
The battlefield still held people, living and dead. The dead lay in heaps like the piles of toy soldiers Kassad had played with as a child. [...] Kassad was beginning to think that this was no simulation. (2.233-2.234)
Kassad tries to distance himself from the horrors of battle by imagining the dead soldiers as fallen toys. Even though it's just a simulation, the consequences of war weigh on him.
Quote #4
Those were the mathematics of the first minutes of the Battle of Bressia. For Kassad, the memory of those days and weeks held not mathematics, but the terrible beauty of combat. (2.292)
The people pushing the buttons might think of war as a numbers game and the men who are lost as statistics. For soldiers, it's much, much more than that.
Quote #5
Warfare had been thrown back to the twentieth or twenty-first century: long, grim campaigns fought through the brick dust of ruined cities over the corpses of civilians. (2.296)
Even with satellite lasers and nuclear charges, sometimes war resorts to hand-to-hand combat, dirty and brutal. Guess there's always going to be a need for martial arts training.
Quote #6
Only the grim resolve of Meina Gladstone and a dozen other determined senators kept the war alive and the troops dying. (2.296)
Notice how it's always the people in charge who keep the battles going, rather than the soldiers putting their lives on the line
Quote #7
The essence of honor lay in the moment of combat between equals. (2.462)
Soon after this, Kassad violates his New Bushido Code by teaming up the Shrike to slaughter the Ousters using the power of time travel. That's hardly equal odds.
Quote #8
Merely a target of opportunity (4.749)
Kassad is describing the Ousters' destruction of the treeship Yggdrasil, in the wrong place at the wrong time. In times of war, innocents are sometimes sacrificed for no good reason.