James S.A. Corey

Holden was starting to feel like they were all monkeys playing with a microwave. Push a button, a light comes on inside, so it__ a light. Push a different button and stick your hand inside, it burns you, so it__ a weapon. Learn to open and close the door, it__ a place to hide things. Never grasping what it actually did, and maybe not even having the framework necessary to figure it out. No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito. So here the monkeys were, poking the shiny box and making guesses about what it did.

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

He is, however,_ Amos continued, __eeping a constant rail gun lock on the Israel__ reactor.__olden ran his fingers through his hair. __o not too generous, then.___ay pretty please, but carry a one-kilo slug of tungsten accelerated to a detectable percentage of c.

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.

Because we can't just blow up enough things that this becomes a good situation.

The messages coming back flooded the comm buffers with rage and sorrow, threats of vengeance and offers of aid. Those last were the hardest. New colonies still trying to force their way into local ecosystems so exotic that their bodies could hardly recognize them as life at all, isolated, exhausted, sometimes at the edge of their resources. And what they wanted was to send back help. He listened to their voices, saw the distress in their eyes. He couldn't help, but love them a little bit. Under the best conditions, disasters and plagues did that. It wasn't universally true. There would always be hoarders and price gouging, people who closed their doors to refugees and left them freezing and starving. But the impulse to help was there too. To carry a burden together, even if it meant having less for yourself. Humanity had come as far as it had in a haze of war, sickness, violence, and genocide. History was drenched in blood. But it also had cooperation and kindness, generosity, intermarriage. The one didn__ come without the other.

Nothing lasted forever. Not peace. Not war. Nothing.

War without end. Well, what was history without that? And how would having the stars change anything?

A few generations living and dying without a sky, and enclosed spaces lost the atavistic terror of premature burial.

In the artifacts that are conscious, memories of vanished lives still flicker. Tissues that were changed without dying hold the moment that a boy heard his sister was leaving home. They hold multiplication tables. They hold images of sexuality and violence and beauty. They hold the memories of flesh that no longer exists. They hold metaphors: mitochondria, starfish, Hitler__-brain-in-a-jar, hell realm. They dream. Structures that were neurons twitch and loop and burn and dream. Images and words and pain and fear, endless.

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.

You__e a tough guy, but I__ a nightmare wrapped in the apocalypse.

There__ a dignity in consequences.

It__ herding kittens. If kittens had a lot of guns and an overdose of neo-Libertarian property theory.

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.

A near-fatal case of scurvy being the only reason I can imagine drinking something with grapefruit juice in it.

Fred__ 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.