Tribalism was an irrational position, and it was impossible to defeat an irrational position with a rational argument.
Too many people with too many agendas, and everyone was worried that the other guy would shoot them in the back. Of all the ways to go and meet the God-like alien whatever-they-were that built the pro...
Time was supposed to heal all wounds. To Drummer, that was just a nice way of saying that if she waited long enough, none of the things that seemed important to her would turn out to matter
Through millions of klicks of vacuum to hit a bull's-eye smaller than a mosquito's asshole.
This is your house...If they don't respect you here, they won't respect you anywhere.
Things change, Red, Amos said, you let us know. Because I’ll still be happy to kill the shit out of her.
They say revenge is empty. This is my first try at it, Holden said. Forgive me if my opinions on it are fairly unformed.
They loved scenes of righteous Godly vengeance on sinful mankind. They loved to show God’s chosen people safe from harm, watching with happy faces as they were proved right to the world. But they neve...
There was a scuffle, and it got out of hand. Dawes, tell me you’ve never had something like it. I’ve never had something like it, Dawes
The lights shifted into and out of his field of view. He wondered if that was what it would be like to look at stars. He’d never looked up at a sky. The thought inspired a certain vertigo. A sense of...
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 Mormons had been planning to run the human race’s first extrasolar colony from a place that would have been equally at home as an accounting office. It felt anticlimactic. Hello, welcome to your c...
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.
Someone would run a card game or set up a pachinko parlor or start a little protection racket. People would be bribed to do things or not do things. It was what happened when you put people together.
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 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.