Tiamat's Wrath (The Expanse, #8)

by James S.A. Corey

Even as the capital city became synonymous with humanity as a whole, the planet around it stayed alien. An island of the profoundly familiar in a sea of we-don’t-understand-that-yet.

In a fight like this, unless you’re willing to lose everything to win, you lose it all by losing.”

She liked the analogy not because it was accurate, but because it was evocative. That was what made analogies useful.

The huge moments in life seemed like they should have more ceremony and effects. The important words—the life-changing ones—should echo a little. But they didn’t. They sounded just like everything else.

Everything they were trying to interact with here had been waiting since humanity had been a kinky idea that two amoebas came up with.

What the protomolecule did to physics looked less like a variation and refinement of the standard models and more like kicking the game table over and scattering the pieces across the floor. Elvi wondered if Jen Lively’s constant lighthearted joking was so she didn’t go insane as her understanding of reality was ripped to shreds in front of her on a daily basis.

She hadn’t understood at the time, but now she thought he was talking about sitting right where she was now. In the transport, heading toward battle, examining his life as he rushed toward its possible end. Who am I? Did the things I accomplished matter? Will I leave the universe a better place than I found it? If I don’t come back, what are my regrets? What are my victories? It was a thing maybe only a warrior could understand. Only those who made the choice to run toward the fire, instead of away from it. That made it feel sacred to her. “This far, and no farther,” she whispered. Her litany to the tyrants and bullies and despots. This far, and no farther. If my life means anything after I’m gone, she thought, I hope it meant that.

Routine was what kept the darkness at bay, when anything did.

Growing older was a falling away of everything that didn’t matter. And a deepening appreciation of all the parts that were important enough to stay.

“I don’t know what the win looks like.” “Well, for me, it looks like dying with the knowledge that humanity’s a little bit better off than it would have been if I’d never been born. A little freer. A little kinder. A little smarter. That the bullies and bastards and sadists got their teeth into a few less people because of me. That’s got to be enough.”

I don’t like things that can only happen once. You can’t make sense of something when there’s no pattern. One data point is the same as none.”

“What can I stop not doin’ so it ain’t not my fault anymore?”

“Easy to make systems with a perfect logic and rigor. All you need to do is leave out the mercy, yeah? Then when you put people into it and they get chewed to nothing, it’s the person’s fault. Not the rules. Everything we do that’s worth shit, we’ve done with people. Flawed, stupid, lying, rules-breaking people. Laconians making the same mistake as ever. Our rules are good, and they’d work perfectly if it were only a different species.” “You sound like someone I know,” Naomi said. “I’ll die for that,” Emma said. “I’ll die so that people can be fuckups and still find mercy.

Distributed responsibility is the problem. One person gives the order, another carries it out. One can say they didn’t pull the trigger, the other that they were just doing what they were told, and everyone lets themselves off the hook.

“there’s only a couple kinds of anger. You get angry because you’re afraid of something or you get angry because you’re frustrated.”

Teresa’s mockery died, and she hugged her knees. It didn’t fit at all with who and what she thought she was, but something in her leaped toward his word. It felt like recognizing someone. Like catching a glimpse of herself from an angle she’d never seen before. It was fascinating.

She took in a breath, ready to speak, and the air rattled against the back of her throat and down into her lungs like a billion little molecule-sized marbles banging against the soft tissue. Her respiration system was a cave inside Timothy’s cave, and she was acutely aware of the complexity of her own body and the answering complexity of the caverns around her. Veins and chips in the wall before her fragmented and smoothed together. Gravity trying to tug her down into the floor, and the astonishingly complex dance of the electrons in the stone and her flesh pushing back. She managed to wonder if she’d been drugged before her awareness was overwhelmed by the immediacy and complexity of the air and her body and the increasingly invisible boundary that failed to really divide her from the world…

There was no better way to seem trustworthy than to be liked by a dog, and there was no better way to convince a dog to like you than bribery.

“Hey,” he said, the way he always did. Every time the same, so that the pattern of it became familiar. So that he became familiar. Because things that are familiar aren’t a threat.

Development into a mature form wasn’t the same as aging and death. Maybe the drones hadn’t understood that. So that meant something about how the protomolecule designers had functioned, didn’t it? That their designs didn’t take growth and maturation into account suggested that the original designers only had mature forms. Adults making adults. She tried to imagine what that would be like.

Who am I? Did the things I accomplished matter? Will I leave the universe a better place than I found it? If I don’t come back, what are my regrets? What are my victories?

And once the repeaters were up, information came to and from the distant worlds beyond the gates with a light delay of only hours. To understand her new reality, she had to find models in ancient history, when the living voice or marks on physical media were the only means of storing and moving information. Ancient North America had used something called the pony express. A series of carts and animals that hauled written information across the then-vast deserts. Or that was how she understood the process, never having seen a pony or a handwritten letter on paper. Now the ponies were ships and torpedoes, the letters were compressed data bursts, and the deserts were the hard vacuum of space and the emptiness of the gate hub at its center.

Decentralized authority was what Belters had done since the start, generations ago, when the power to communicate orders outdistanced the power to enforce them. Old Rokku, back in her radical days, had talked about the inners being like a sword that hit in one place hard enough to destroy. The Belt was like water, able to push in from all places at once.

There were so many last times that passed unrecognized. Knowing in the moment what was ending and wouldn’t come again was precious.

Wars never ended because one side was defeated. They ended because the enemies were reconciled. Anything else was just a postponement of the next round of violence.

So she’d lied. That was interesting. She’d told him what he wanted to hear, and it wasn’t even because she wanted to protect him or keep him safe. It was just easier. She understood now why adults lied to children. It wasn’t love. It was exhaustion.

believe that the enemy, whatever it is, is experimenting with new ways to break conscious systems. Brains. I think we’re the equivalent of a penicillin-resistant infection, and the last event we experienced was an attempt at tetracycline.”

The universe is always stranger than you think. It didn’t matter how broad her imagination was, how cynical, how joyous and open, how well researched or wild minded. The universe was always stranger. Every dream, every imagining, however lavish and improbable, inevitably fell short of the truth.