The bartender – Chip – said, Had a few too many of my margaritas? The first one was too many, Holden replied, then climbed under the booth looking for the terminal. And calling that a margarita should...
The Tachi’s galley had a full kitchen and a table with room for twelve. It also had a full-size coffeepot that could brew forty cups of coffee in less than five minutes whether the ship was in zero g...
The Ring didn’t put us on alert, he said. It’s the Martians. Even with that thing out there, we’re still thinking about shooting each other. That’s pretty fucked up. Sorry. Messed up. It seems like we...
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.
That moment of shaking had been a whole battle too abrupt for a human mind to follow. He wasn’t sure if that was amazing or terrifying. Maybe there was room for both.
Tachi’s galley had a full kitchen and a table with room for twelve. It also had a full-size coffeepot that could brew forty cups of coffee in less than five minutes whether the ship was in zero g or u...
Sometimes you don't get redeemed... Not every stain comes out. Sometimes you do something bad enough that you carry the consequences for the rest of your life and take the regrets to the grave. That's...
Some sins carried their own punishment. Sometimes redemption meant carrying the past with you forever. She’d gotten used to that over the years, but it was still pretty fucking inconvenient.
So either panicking amateurs or something critical to defend, Holden said. A metal canister the size of a fist rolled through the gateway, clanking. Amos picked the grenade up casually and tossed it b...
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 noticed Amos watching her. He had a dopey grin on his face. Seriously. Now? she said. We're talking about your captain going off to his death, and all that's going through your head right now is '...
She felt that politics was the second most evil thing humanity had ever invented, just after lutefisk.
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...
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...
Rebecca Byers, the comm officer on duty, could have been bred from a shark and a hatchet. Black eyes, sharp features, lips so thin they might as well not have existed. The story on board was that she’...
Realizing you’ve got shit on your fingers is the first step toward washing your hands.
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.
Nothing ever killed more people than being afraid to look like a sissy. Holden’s