So are you conscious? The alien robot—the skin the Miller construct was using—shrugged. It was strange how well the gesture translated. Don’t know. Seems like I’m acing my Turing test, though. Elvi
Show a human a closed door, and no matter how many open doors she finds, she'll be haunted by what might be behind it.
She’d grown up in Martian gravity . She had to mass a hundred kilos at one g, easy.
She tapped the red dot on the map that was the Tempest. Anything you can do, I can do better.
She felt that politics was the second most evil thing humanity had ever invented, just after lutefisk. There
Seemed like a fact of the universe that the closer you got to anything, the worse it looked. Take the most beautiful person in the solar system, zoom in on them at the right magnification and they wer...
Same here, Cap'n, Amos said. I got a lot of past in my past.
Saber rattling we’ve done before, she said. We’ve survived it. It’s a known quantity. I have a binder with nine hundred pages of analysis and contingency plans for conflict with Mars, including fourte...
Routine was what kept the darkness at bay, when anything did.
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...
Recycled air that had passed through a million lungs. Water from the tap so clean it could be used for lab work, but it had been piss and shit and tears and blood and would be again. The circle of lif...
Poker is a game, too, Bobbie said. But sometimes the stakes get so high that one player decides it's easier to kill the other guy and walk away with the money.
No, there doesn’t. Every time someone starts talking about final anythings in politics, that means the atrocities are warming up. Humanity has done amazing things by just muddling through, arguing and...
Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, but it is the mother of any number of other things as well: sacrifice and monstrosity and metamorphosis. Necessity is the mother of all necessary thing...
Naomi coughed. It was wet, painful sound, but the medical bay didn't seem concerned. The machine had a shitty bedside manner.
My life has become a single, ongoing revelation that I haven’t been cynical enough. At
Miller closed his terminal, frowning. Philosophical. But if it’s the price of doing business, what’re we here for? Because I thought you… you people had this shit under control. Ever since we stopped...
Kings were always the last to feel the famine. That wasn’t just the Belt. That was all of history. The people who’d just been going about their lives were the ones who could speak to the actual cost o...
Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick, did that ship just fire a spread of torpedoes at us?
I’m twenty years too old, and I’m pretty sure I’ve got the wrong plumbin’, but I like that gal.