The beautiful thing about losing your illusions, he thought, was that you got to stop pretending.
The aliens that sent the protomolecule hadn’t needed to destroy humanity. They’d given humans the opportunity to destroy themselves, and as a species, they’d leaped on it.
The advantage of being in command of all the guns was that no matter how nicely you asked for something, it was still an order.
That’s the secret, you know. What’s the secret? Kajri smiled. The people who have power over you are weak too. They shit and bleed and worry that their children don’t love them anymore. They’re embarr...
That was the danger of being old and a politician. Habits outlived the situations that created them. Policies remained in place after the situations that inspired them had changed. The calculus of all...
Taking the things that other people thought they deserved to keep was dangerous work.
Sure, boss, Havelock said. Cool as November, smooth as China silk.
Stop making me fall in love with you, Cap, we both know it can’t go anywhere.
Someone just broke pretty much all of human civilization overnight. The
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 how did you wind up joining the Rebellion?An old guy and a kid were looking for a ride and I needed the money, Han said. After that, it was just bad luck.
Shit, Amos said. And here I was enjoying being so absolutely thumb-up-the-ass useless. You
She tapped the red dot on the map that was the Tempest. Anything you can do, I can do better.
She pulled a sheer yellow scarf over her hair, swathed her neck, and tied it at her sternum, the ironic echo of her old hijab.
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. And some of the best men I know, you’d walk out...
Rebecca Byers, the comm officer on duty, could have been bred from a shark and a hatchet.
Prepare us for what? Holden asked. To poke gods with a sharp stick? No, Captain Holden. No sticks, Duarte said. When you fight gods, you storm heaven.
Posthuman. It was a word that came up in the media every five or six years, and it meant different things every time. Neural regrowth hormone? Posthuman. Sex robots with inbuilt pseudo intelligence? P...
Or spadefoot toads in the deserts? In the dry periods, their eggs would just desiccate, so the adults go dormant until there’s rain, and then they come back awake and go out to the puddles and mate fu...
Only, so far, it was like a bunch of lizards watching the World Cup. Politely put, they weren’t sure what they were looking at.