Shards of Earth (The Final Architecture, #1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

When you’ve built the latest in superior military hammers, surely all your problems start looking like inferior Colonial nails.

“They train us to talk about it. They train us to heal, and not to deny we’re in pain. Rock-hard is brittle.”

That was the problem with associating with criminals. It led to Newtonian espionage. Each action produced an equal and opposite reaction and you couldn’t use without being used in turn.

“The problem with judgement calls is that they’re only ever good or bad in retrospect.”