Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection

by James S.A. Corey

He stared out at all of them like an actor who’d just forgotten the St. Crispin’s Day speech.

She was smaller than Filip, with light brown skin and a mane of tight-curled hair that was auburn where it wasn’t gray.

Her last name was a mouthful of Russian that sounded like a puppy falling down stairs, so everyone called her Nami Veh.

The timeless stretch when all minds had smeared together like oil paints being mixed by a gigantic, uncaring thumb had come when he and Mose had reached Beta. Filip’s memory of that period was spotty and odd. Like he was trying to recall the details of a dream too big to fit in his finite skull.

Someone on the astronomy team had spotted the ring falling sunward into a new long elliptical orbit, shoved out of its former place at the edge of the solar system by some unknown, godlike hand. No one on Jannah knew why. They never would.

the price of beer was hauling himself up on a monster’s back while the bolt thrower on the fabrication lab shot holes in it, water was fine for him.

The only right you have with anyone in this life is the right to walk away.

When the apocalypse came, bullets and liquor would be the only currency that mattered.

It was slower putting together than it had been taking apart. Filip felt like that was true for a lot of things.

He thought of her as professionally, blandly attractive, with the gentle eyes and hard smile of someone whose job it was to say things were all right even when they were not. But she actually had a much more expressive face, with a webwork of wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and eyes that seemed equally at ease with both sorrow and laughter. Her hair was auburn and touched with gray, but it had more warmth to it than he remembered.

“You say that now,” Nami said with a laugh, “but having anyone care that much and try that hard to save you from yourself can be fucking exhausting.”

The only point is that our parents can lay burdens on us, all without meaning to, that we’ll have to carry around for the rest of our lives and there’s nothing we can do about that. But you and I still get to decide how we carry those burdens.”

You plug a leak when it’s small, or you suffer when it’s big.”

For this to work, a million things have to go right. For it to fall apart, just one of them has to go wrong.”

“Thank you, but I don’t deserve any mercy.” “Of course you don’t. That’s why they call it mercy. If you deserve it, they call it justice.”

Technical knowledge advances. The organism stays the same.

We’re spending our whole lives together, so we need to be really gentle.