Well, mostly I’m a mechanic. But the idea that the UN has a file on me somewhere that lists me as the Rocinante’s killer? That’s kind of awesome.
They had no idea what it does, but they slapped their label on it like they’d made it. They found an alien weapon, and all they could think to do was brand it. There’s
There were two sides fighting—that was true enough—but they weren’t the inner planets versus the Belters. They were the people who thought it was a good idea to kill people who looked or acted differe...
There was something liberating and terrifying about the first day on a new job. In any new assignment, Bobbie had always had the unsettling feeling that she was in over her head, that she wouldn’t kno...
The slow zone, based on the sensor data we’re able to get, is approximately one million kilometers across. Holden pointed at the 3D representation on the screen behind him. There are no visible stars,...
The same beautiful bullshit that everyone told themselves. That they were special. That they mattered. That some vast intelligence behind the curtains of reality cared what happened to them. And in al...
The pachinko machines lit them blue and green and shrieked in artificial delight.
The keel-mounted rail gun pushed the whole ship backward in a solid mathematical relationship to the mass of the two-kilo tungsten round moving at a measurable fraction of c. Newton’s third law expres...
The immediate danger wasn’t the Ring. At least not right now. It was humans taking their anxiety out on the nearest enemy they could actually see: each other.
The birds, on the other hand, were going crazy. They filled the air with chirps and trills and songs. It was probably sparrow for Holy shit, what’s going on, we’re all gonna die, but it sounded pretty...
The Epstein Drive hadn’t given humanity the stars, but it had delivered the planets.
The , registered to Captain Eric Khan out of Pallas, was still just goods and people heading into the frontier to stake a claim. Fewer horses, maybe, but more fusion reactors.
That’s the thing about autocracy. It looks pretty decent while it still looks pretty decent. Survivable, anyway. And it keeps looking like that right up until it doesn’t. That’s how you find out it’s...
That seemed to be the human pattern—reach out to the unknown and then make it into the sort of thing you left in the first place.
That humans only have so much emotional energy. No matter how intense the situation, or how powerful the feelings, it was impossible to maintain a heightened emotional state forever. Eventually you’d...
She’d stopped looking tired a while ago and had moved on to whatever tired turns into when it became a lifestyle.
She had seen Holden on the newsfeeds and reports. At the beginning of the war between Mars and the Belt, he had been the most important man in the solar system, and the celebrity, while it had waxed a...
Reputation never has very much to do with reality, she said. I could name half a dozen paragons of virtue that are horrible, small-souled, evil people.
Point of clarification, Alex said, raising his hand. We have an apocalypse comin’? Was that a thing we knew about? Venus, Avasarala said. Oh. That apocalypse, Alex said, lowering his hand. Right.
Nothing that’ll kill us sounded good, but Holden felt a pang for his coffeemaker.