Rest of
Now he was about to be killed because of yet another petty human with more power than sense. It didn’t seem fair.
By not elaborating, he’d sort of told the truth. The fact was weirdly disturbing.
You don’t have a right thing, friend, Miller said. You’ve got a whole plateful of maybe a little less wrong.
We’re not people, he said. We’re the stories that people tell each other about us. Belters are crazy terrorists. Earthers are lazy gluttons. Martians are cogs in a great big machine. Men are fighters,...
We’re like children, Anna said, pushing herself to her feet and lecturing down at him. Who burn their hands on a hot stove and then think the solution is to blow up all the stoves.
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.
No, it wasn’t. It was the scariest fucking answer to Fermi’s paradox I can think of. Do you know why there aren’t any Indians in your Old West analogy? Because they’re already dead. The whatever-they-...
I thought if you told people , they'd draw their conclusions, and because the facts were true, the conclusions mostly would be too. But we don't run on facts. We run on stories about things. About peo...
Howdy, XO, he drawled. The old west affectation common to everyone from the Mariner Valley annoyed Holden. There hadn’t been a cowboy on Earth in a hundred years, and Mars didn’t have a blade of grass...
How many captains of stolen ships did it take to equal one disgraced UN official? That could tie a courtroom up for a few decades.
He imagined himself landing on the station, and Miller saying, James Holden, you and only you in the universe have the correct chemical composition to make a perfect wormhole fuel!
Excitement and dread wore each other’s clothes, spoke in the same voice.
Don’t, Naomi said, letting him go, pull your gun on anyone. They have guns. Guns plural. You have gun singular, which is why you will keep yours in your holster, or you’ll do this by yourself. That’s
Do people talk about the war? Miller asked. Often, the missionary said. Anyone make sense of it? No. I don’t believe war ever does. It’s a madness that’s in our nature. Sometimes it recurs; sometimes...
The only thing she and Tilly had in common was their carbon base.
If Miller had brought him all this way just to let him die in an abandoned train car, it was the longest prank setup in history.
Heroism is a label most people get for doing shit they’d never do if they were really thinking about it. Anna