spacehound n.

‘I was horribly dizzy and nauseated at first, but it’s going away.’ ‘That’s good…. If you’re as well as that already, you'll be a regular spacehound in half an hour.’

But Hawkins was an old spacehound, just barely hanging on.

For a hard-bitten old spacehound, he knows more about botany than any man I've ever met.

He was a good man, Cap McNeally. A hardened spacehound, canny and wise to the ways of the void, always on deck in moments of emergency. That’s why the IPS, the Corporation for which we work, had placed him in command of the Antigone, finest and fastest ship in the fleet.

What in all infested outer space does that spacehound mean by talking to me like that?

I'm just an old space-hound, but I know what I'm talking about.

Sawtelle smiled—the first time the startled Hilton had known that the hard, tough old spacehound could smile.

My attempts to play seasoned old spacehound to Norrey’s breathless tourist were laughably unsuccessful. No one ever gets jaded to space, and I took deep satisfaction in being the one who introduced Norrey to it.

And there were barriers, still imperfectly understood, between the bands that meant cracking the wall was always risky. If a ship hit the wall just wrong or with the slightest harmonic in her translation field, she simply disappeared. She went acoherent, spread over a multitude of dimensions and forever unable to reconstitute herself, a thought which broke a cold sweat on the most hardened spacehound, for no one knew what happened inside the ship. Did the crew die? Did they go into some sort of stasis? Or did they gradually discover what had happened... and that they had become a galactic Flying Dutchman for all eternity?

‘There was no way,’ Flora said, ‘a ship from L4 would have reached me in time with my air supply.’ ‘You did the right thing,’ Aldo said. ‘And you did it better than I could have done it.‘ He took a small box from his pocket and opened it. ‘You may not be on outside duty anymore, but you're still a space hound.’