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 door to the primary power junction was reinforced. A red border was painted around the frame, with warnings in half a dozen languages that all meant Please be careful. There’s a lot of things in h...
The detective had been watching the video of Julie Mao's fight with her captors over and over again while they'd waited on Naomi and Amos to finish their work. It gave Holden the disquieting feeling t...
The boys spoke in loud, angry voices about tyranny and freedom. The girls watched the boys strut. The ancient, animal story, the same whether it was on a spinning rock surrounded by hard vacuum or the...
The beautiful thing about losing your illusions, he thought, was that you got to stop pretending.
That Holden is up to something? Have you met that guy? He’s never done anything secretly in his life.
Thank you, Mister Patel, Holden said. In thanks, you may now have all my stuff. I don’t care about any of it anymore. Including the coffee maker, sir? Almost all my stuff.
Still. Maybe some good can come out of it.I admire your psychotic optimism.
So you’re trying to get me prepared for one of my crew dying? Historically speaking, humans are pretty much at a hundred percent on that.
So there was this unlicensed brothel down in sector 18. We went thinking we’d be hauling fifteen, twenty people in. More, maybe. Got there, and the place was stripped to the stone,
So I think to myself, the bartender said, reaching back toward the glassware by the mirror, you’re here for something. The Butcher of Anderson Station in a Belter bar.
Shouldn’t let go of being educated, he said. Universe spent a lot of time telling you something. Now you’re second-guessing it. Maybe all those other things were getting you ready for this. Something
She’d always found a deep comfort in praying. A profound sense of connection to something infinitely larger than herself. Her atheist friends called it awe in the face of an infinite cosmos. She calle...
She was grinning like the universe had given her a kiss.
She sat at the dining table, a steaming mug of tea in front of her, a distant look in her eyes. Holden couldn’t tell if she was melancholy or solving a complex engineering problem in her head. Those l...
Seemed like a fact of the universe that the closer you got to anything, the worse it looked. Take
Saying ‘no problem’ is a sure sign that everything is about to go terribly wrong, Han said.
Rebecca Byers, the comm officer on duty, could have been bred from a shark and a hatchet.
People always whispered when they were hiding. Wrapped in a space suit and surrounded by vacuum, Gomez could have been lighting fireworks inside his armor and no one would have heard it, but he whispe...
Owning your own racing ship wasn’t even wealth. It was like speciation. It was conspicuous consumption befitting ancient Earth royalty, a pharaoh’s pyramid with a reaction drive.