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.”

make sure you’re on the ship and squared away twenty-four hours from now or find my foot uncomfortably up your ass.”

“I call them ‘the Romans.’ The great empire that rose and fell in antiquity, and left their roads behind.”

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

She was, as Alex’s copilot Caspar liked to quip, a couple thousand tons of fuck-up-your-day stuffed into a five-kilo sack.

They’d control the ship and search at their leisure. For values of leisure up to maybe five or ten whole minutes.

The oldest, most human system in the empire, sure. But not home. There would be a thousand homes, and if history was a guide, in a generation or two, everyone would think wherever they were was the most important one.

But all the stories about the devil making a deal and then cheating missed the point. The real horror was that once the bargain was struck, the devil didn’t cheat. He gave you exactly and explicitly all that had been promised.

Getting what you want fucks you up.

“Good. That’s good. Because some people, when they almost die from being semidrowned in half-alien goo while under a sustained high-g burn, get a little rash. Or zits. Near death can really do terrible things for acne.”

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.

“You’re never going to convince me that this whole ‘sky’ thing isn’t fucking creepy. I like my air held in by something I can see, thank you very much.”

“Doing the briefings is my downtime.” “Coordinating a massive resistance to an authoritarian and galaxy-spanning empire is your hobby?”

The Roci was an old ship now. She’d never be state of the art again. But like old tools, well used and well cared for, she’d become something more than plating and wires, conduits and storage and sensor arrays. Old Rokku had said that after fifty years flying, a ship had a soul. It had seemed like a cute superstition when she was young. It seemed obvious now.

I want this war over with, and a real peace established. The kind where people can be angry with each other and hate each other and no one has to die over it. That’d be enough.”

A quarter million tons of pieces smuggled to an empty moon and welded back together like a child’s model kit with a one-to-one scale.

“All right,” Ilich said. “Okay. That happened. That just happened.” “Major Okoye?” Trejo said. His normally dark face was pale and gray. “I have never fucking seen anything like that. Ever,” she said. “Holy fucking shit.” “I agree,” Trejo said.

the high consul’s daughter had run away with the enemy in what might perhaps be humanity’s newest record-setting act of teenage rebellion.