Any meeting with Martian command is going to have to wait until after the situation on Ganymede is stabilized. Official diplomatic talks before then are only going to make it seem like we’ve accepted...
Annie, Tilly said. If I wanted to suck vile fluids out of a flaccid and indifferent tube, I'd have stayed on Earth with my husband.
Anna had walked on a moon of Jupiter. She’d looked up through a dome-covered sky at the great red spot, close enough to see the swirls and eddies of a storm larger than her home world. She’d tasted wa...
And with all of the enemy's citizens living at the bottom of huge gravity wells, we don't even have to aim particularly well. Einstein was right. We will be fighting the next war with rocks. But the B...
And the moral high ground is a lovely place, Marwick said, as if he were agreeing. It won’t stop a missile, though.
And even then, she hadn’t wanted to die. She’d just wanted it to be over. To be free of it all. For the pain and guilt to be over. And the feeling of being trapped. She might have been able to stand a...
And I understand you’ve got a few after-market add-ons — Keel-mounted rail gun, Alex said with a grin. — that scream of overcompensating for tiny, tiny penises, but might prove useful. The
Amazing how much we’ve managed to do, considering how we’re doing it all with jumped-up social primates and evolutionary behaviors from the Pleistocene.
All of them do what they think is right, and tell themselves that they’re moral people with the strength to do the necessary things, however terrible they seem at the time. Every atrocity that has bee...
Alex’s experience of real family—of blood relations—was more like having a lot of people who had all wound up on the same mailing list without knowing quite why they signed up for it.
Against all evidence, I keep thinking the assholes are outliers. She
Ade, I like you. I mean, I really enjoy your company, he said. I don’t understand why we can’t spend some time together with our clothes on. Holden. Sweetie. Stop it, okay? Stop what? Stop trying to t...
A soft hushing sound, like fingernails scratching down an endless sheet of paper.
A lot of people claim to believe in things. ‘Family is most important,’ but they’ll screw a fifty-dollar hooker on payday. ‘Country first,’ but they cheat on their taxes. Not you, though. You say ever...
A guy I once knew tried to justify his life choices to me by comparing himself to Genghis Khan. I take it you didn’t find his argument compelling? Murtry asked with a smirk. No, Holden said. And then...
A bicycle? Amos leaned on the breakfast bar. Sure. They don’t need fuel, they don’t get sick. Most of the repairs, you can handle on your own. You’re looking for post-apocalyptic transportation, bikes...
When the lights went out. It wasn’t just the lights. So many things about his physical situation changed all at once that his hindbrain couldn’t keep up. It told him to be nauseated just in case he’d...
The only thing she and Tilly had in common was their carbon base.
While he spoke, he never even made it in front of the ethics review. Quit the day before. Made a lot of fuss, walking through the lab and yelling that we weren’t going to be able to push him around an...
There really wasn’t any such thing as a mixed church group. No matter what they looked like, or what they chose to call Him, when a group of people called out to God together, they were one.