Drainage tubes ran out of his belly and side, and there was a catheter the size of a pencil coming out his penis. Nothing particularly hurt, so he had to assume he was on pretty nearly all the narcotics there were.
A few generations living and dying without a sky, and enclosed spaces lost the atavistic terror of premature burial.
War without end. Well, what was history without that? And how would having the stars change anything?
Nothing lasted forever. Not peace. Not war. Nothing.
Because we can’t just blow up enough things that this becomes a good situation.
His strike force stood around him, craning their necks, in awe of the massive emptiness all around. He was almost sorry to pull his attention back to the small, vaguely intimate necessities of violence.
We were full of righteous anger and dreams of vengeance when we got here, and a couple of blowjobs and hangovers later it’s like nothing ever happened
Posthuman. It was a word from advertising copy, breathless and empty, and all he’d ever thought it really meant was that the people using it had a limited imagination about what exactly humans were capable of.
No one lived forever. But you fought for every minute you could get. Bought a little more with a lot of hard work.
The usual state of nature is recovering from the last disaster.
That’s what peace is, right? Postponing the conflict until the thing you were fighting over doesn’t matter.
Part of his mind was screaming, but it was a distant one and easy to ignore.
It was some of Solomon’s favorite music because it was dense and intellectually complicated and he wasn’t expected to dance to it.
Every empire grow until its reach exceeds its grasp
And somehow, that changed everything about sex. The movements might all be the same, but the desire to communicate affection rather than demonstrate prowess changed what everything meant.
The sex,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure that we were okay. That things were all right between us.”“Well,” she said, “orgasm does release a lot of oxytocin, so I’m probably more fond of you than before.
I don’t kill children,” she said. “Not even when it’s the right thing to do.
His words were full of hope and threat. Like the stars.
The margins of the space were bright without illuminating anything or casting shadows, sharp and terrible. It reminded her of the way schizophrenics and people suffering migraines would describe light as assaulting and dangerous.
Partners,” she said, and fired two rounds into his head.
Later,” Amos said, “when you’re wishing we had this stuff, I am going to merciless in my mockery. And then we’ll die.
If we accept the premise that we’re always wrong, it really removes the incentive to spend a lot of time trying to make good guesses because even the good guesses turn out to be wrong. So, make plausible guesses… and tell a good story.
By the time the Somnambulist had set her creaking bones to rest on their assigned landing pad, Holden had lost all patience with human stupidity.So, of course, it came out to meet him.
The moral high ground is a lovely place. It won’t stop a missile, though. It won’t alter the trajectory of a gauss round.
Or was that fatalism another good move in design space? Did the universe evolve eyes and wings and sense organs and bitter amusement at the prospect of death all the same way?
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.
A woman’s voice ululated on the sound system, somewhere between an Islamic call to prayer and orgasm with a drumbeat.
But we don’t run on facts. We run on stories about things. About people.
Nothing wrong with a little optimism, long as it doesn’t set policy….
The grass is always greener on the other side of personal extinction.
We’re all traitors now.” “Ha!” the old lady said. “Only if we lose.
it felt like waking up over and over without falling sleep in between.
The fact had become as invisible to him as someone on Earth thinking about being held to a spinning celestial object by nothing more than mass, shielded from the fusion reaction of the sun by only distance and air.
He’d turned away from a life on basic to live in the stars, or if not the stars, at least the rocks that floated free in the night sky.
That’s what it’s come to, Miller thought, rubbing a hand across his chin. Pogroms after all. Cut off just a hundred more heads, just a thousand more heads, just ten thousand more heads, and then we’ll be free.
Well,” Han said with a sigh, “we’ve gone from no-plan to stupid-plan. That’s progress of a sort.
Yeah,” Chris said. “I lose a couple limbs getting drunk and falling into harvesting combine, I’m an idiot. I lose the same limbs because I happened to be standing next to the right door when the ship was damaged, I’m a hero.
Nothing like a little shared racism to build ties with the boss.
Some things stayed secrets even when you told them.
Either help or give up. Right now devil’s advocate is just another name for asshole.
For a moment, his pupils flickered blue, like there were tiny bathypelagic fish swimming in the deep trenches of his eyeballs.
Fayez whistled low. “That is not dead which can eternal lie. Or, y’know, whatever.
I’m a long-flight pilot. Pushing a little bubble of air-filled metal across an ocean of nothing is what I was born to do.
You want a shadow, you got to have light and something to get in its way.
Io, this is Admiral Muhan of the Martian Congressional Republic Navy. You fire anything bigger than a bottle rocket and we will glass the whole fucking moon. Do you read me?
It was a mating dance only slightly more dignified than presenting like a mandrill, but endearing in its own fashion.
The only right you have with anyone in life is to the right to walk away.
You can order the sun to come up if you time it right. I’m not driving this bus. Making it do what I want would be like talking someone out of a seizure.
The problem with living with miracles was that they made everything seem plausible.
The velocities and forces involved in anything at orbital altitudes were enough to kill a human with just the rounding error. At their speeds, the friction from air too thin to breathe would set them on fire.
I’m sorry you lost the suit,’ he said.She shrugged.’At this point, it was mostly a metaphor anyway,’ she said…
You know,” Naomi said, “if you’re looking at hundreds of people burning to death as a problem solving itself, that may be more evidence that you’re on wrong side.
On Mars, the joke went, a man’s hole was his castle where values of castle approached dorm room.
Intellectually he knows that the blood is being pressed to the back of his body, pooling in the back part of his cerebellum and flooding his kidneys. He hasn’t done enough medical work to know what that means, but it can’t be good.
He almost blacks out again, but he’s not sure if it’s the stroke or the thrust gravity. He’s pretty sure driving blood pressure higher while having a stroke is considered poor form.
Fred’s vacuum-rated armor protected him from the smell of viscera, but it reported it to him as a slight increase in atmospheric methane levels. The stench of death reduced to a data point.
Every now and then a green dot shifted to yellow. A soldier down, their armored suits detecting the injuries or death that rendered them combat ineffective. Combat ineffective. Such a nice euphemism for one of his kids bleeding out.
A near-fatal case of scurvy being the only reason I can imagine drinking something with grapefruit juice in it.
She’d been attacked. Just after she came to the Belt. She was seeing that it didn’t happen twice.””Attacked,” Miller said, parsing the man’s tone of voice. “Raped?””I didn’t ask.
It’s herding kittens. If kittens had a lot of guns and an overdose of neo-Libertarian property theory.
You’re a tough guy, but I’m a nightmare wrapped in the apocalypse.