Awesome / Excession

• The Elench drone that carved a message into the ship that was destroying it! gets one of these. Its quick thinking and Xanatos Speed Chess escape from the Excession certainly gives it a significant Moment of Awesome in the lead-up.
• The Sleeper Service turning its ENTIRE INTERIOR INTO ENGINE SPACE!. It's a GSV, so the scope of that feat is literally beyond human comprehension. How it manages to dupe most of the Culture, subvert Special Circumstances spies, and pull off a Big Damn Heroes moment at the end makes a large chunk of the ending an amalgamated CMOA for the Sleeper.
  • Particularly when its watcher's only flabbergasted response is (and this is a ship capable of frying stars and with a speed measured in kilolights):
  Yawning Angel: Two hundred and thirty-three thousand times the speed of light. Dear holy fucking shit.
• Grey Area gets its own when it manages to talk to the Excession and hitch a ride on it. When you've just managed to figured out how to communicate and gain passage with an entity at least older than an entire galaxy through your powers of analysis and observation, you have to be given credit where credit's due. Of course, depending on your point of view, you could make the case that systematically going through the galaxy and torturing every sentient being that committed genocide, torture, or mass-murder by making them relive their victim's last moments could be worth a CMOA mention.
• The Interesting Times Gang. They're Bunny Ears Lawyers who effectively run the Culture. Just that sentence lands them deserving a possible contender for a Moment of Awesome.
• Everything that Rapid Offensive Unit Killing Time does, starting at the confrontation at Pittance and carrying all the way through the rest of the book.
  • Killing Time: Missed, you fuckers!
  • Shoot Them Later: Dear me, you don't believe in making things easy for people, do you?
    Killing Time: I am a warship. That is not my function.
  • During a fight Killing Time destroys two other starships and thinks afterwards "Entire engagement duration; eleven microseconds".

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