Babylon's Ashes (The Expanse, #6)

by James S.A. Corey

There was an excitement in their voices. Some of it was their fear dressing up in party clothes, but some of it wasn’t.

Her life had been squandered, and whether she said it in pentameter or not didn’t seem to matter much.

I have killed, but I am not a killer because a killer is a monster, and monsters aren’t afraid.

She snorted in military-grade derision.

The sludge of dust and debris wasn’t sinking as quickly as the models had suggested, and the light-eating plants and microbiota were dying off as a result. If there hadn’t been so many fucking human beings stressing the food webs over the last few centuries, the system might have been more robust.

History itself was a massive n=1 study, irreproducible. It was what made it so difficult to learn from.

“Always good to have a penis in uniform in the room,”

Lifting weights was an argument against a benign God. As if that needed more evidence.

Amen

“How do hookworms figure into catching fish, anyway?” “Not hookworms,” Jim said. “Worms, like earthworms. Or insects. Crickets. You’d put them on metal hooks with a barb on the end, tie a really thin line to the metal hook, and throw the whole thing out into a lake or a river. Hope that a fish would eat the worm, and then you could haul the fish out with the hook that was caught in its mouth.” “Sounds inefficient and needlessly cruel.” “It really sort of is.”

In the aftermath of the system-wide battle and its unsettling aftermath at the ring, the partisans of the Free Navy had felt an overwhelming sense of injustice. It was as if the disappearance of the Pella and its battle force had been a bad call in a football match, and they were trying to find a referee to shout down.

See, even the authors are calling out the deus ex machina moment! :D