Tiamat's Wrath (The Expanse, #8)

by James S.A. Corey

“The people who have power over you are weak too. They shit and bleed and worry that their children don’t love them anymore. They’re embarrassed by the stupid things they did when they were young that everyone else has forgotten. And so they’re vulnerable. We all define ourselves by the people around us, because that’s the kind of monkey we are. We can’t transcend it. So when they watch you, they hand you the power to change what they are too.”

IF LIFE TRANSCENDS DEATH, THEN I WILL SEEK FOR YOU THERE. IF NOT, THEN THERE TOO.

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

Being everywhere was just as good a way to be invisible as not being anywhere.

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.

There are people I love. There are people who have loved me. I fought for what I believed, protected those I could, and stood my ground against the encroaching darkness. Good enough.

That’s the thing about autocracy. It looks pretty decent while it still looks pretty decent. Survivable, anyway. And it keeps looking like that right up until it doesn’t. That’s how you find out it’s too late.

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.

“You are about to run an n-equals-one experiment where one is the number of universes we can break trying to satisfy Duarte’s curiosity.”

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

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 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.

This was the problem with thousand-year Reichs. They came and they went like fireflies.

She twisted at the hips, stretching. The stars of the galactic disk spread against the horizonless sky. Some of that light had been traveling for centuries. Millennia. Longer. Many of those stars would have died long before she was born. What a weird fate for a photon to be spat out of a nuclear fireball, speed through the vast emptiness between stars, and land on a Martian Marine’s retina while she decided whether she still feared death, or if she was ready. She’d done this a dozen times before.

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.

That was the thing about hubris. It only became clear in retrospect.

“That’s the thing about alien biologies and transdimensional monsters,” Fayez sighed. “At least they’re not supposed to make sense.”

Dreams were fragile things to build with. Titanium and ceramic lasted longer.