Cibola Burn (Expanse, #4)

by James S.A. Corey

“Then that’s a decision the squatters will have made, and we’ll respect their choice,” Murtry said.

“There’s a dignity in consequences.”

Now their conversations were so careful, it was like the words all had glass bones.

“Later,” Amos said, “when you’re wishing we had this stuff, I am going to be merciless in my mockery. And then we’ll die.”

But it’s like my eyes are forcing those patterns on stars that aren’t really lined up the right way to make them.”

“You want a shadow, you got to have light and something to get in its way.”

“The frontier always outpaces the law,”

This is some Croatoan shit.”

Human brains needed an answer, even if they had to make up something they knew was bullshit.

Making everything as modular and easy to swap out as possible wasn’t just sensible, it was a survival trait. He wondered if the Martians had had a Belter on the design team.

“The usual state of nature is recovering from the last disaster,” she said. It was a truism of ecological biologists, and she said it the way a religious person might pray. To make sense of what she saw. To comfort herself. To give the world some sense of purpose or meaning. Species rose in an environment, and that environment changed.

Nothing points out shared humanity like a natural disaster.

This, she realized, was the first place she’d been in her life where she could see true wilderness the way it had been for millennia on Earth. Red in tooth and claw. Deadly and uncaring. Vast, unpredictable, and complex as anything she could imagine.

“Flirting’s the last thing to go,”

“I told you about this,” she said, “that there are good moves—maybe even forced moves—in design space because we see things that show up again and again all through different branches of the tree of life.”

“You are the only woman I have ever known who would figure out how to keep a bunch of starving refugees including herself from going blind and be excited because it means something about microbiology.”

“Right,” Holden said. “No coffee. This is a terrible, terrible planet. Show me how to make everyone better.”

“Sometimes just showing up is a lot.”

The velocities and forces involved in anything at orbital altitudes were enough to kill a human with just the rounding error.

And the state of nature was always recovering from the last disaster.

Basia had no doubt that they’d work just as hard to keep each other alive for even a few more minutes. It wasn’t something he’d ever had to think about before. But it did seem to be a microcosm of everything in life. No one lived forever. But you fought for every minute you could get. Bought a little more with a lot of hard work. It made Basia proud and sad at the same time. Maybe that was how a warrior felt, standing on ground he knew he’d never leave alive.

But, like so many things in life, when you come to the spot where you’re supposed to do the rituals, you do them.

All of nature was a record of crisis and destruction and adaptation and flourishing and being knocked back down again.

“This planet doesn’t have mountains, it has hemlines.”

“Civilization has a built-in lag time. Just like light delay. We fly out here to this new place, and because we’re civilized, we think civilization comes with us. It doesn’t. We build it. And while we’re building it, a whole lot of people die. You think the American west came with railroads and post offices and jails? Those things were built, and at the cost of thousands of lives. They were built on the corpses of everyone who was there before the Spanish came. You don’t get one without the other. And it’s people like me that do it. People like you come later.

You’re like Peter Pan, she says. When a child died, Peter Pan would fall halfway with them. So they wouldn’t be scared.

“But honestly, don’t sniff that number. You don’t know where it’s been.”

Amos wore serious injury better than anyone else Holden knew.

“The frontier doesn’t have laws, it has cops?”

“For the most part. It’s herding kittens. If kittens had a lot of guns and an overdose of neo-Libertarian property theory.

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.