Abaddon's Gate (The Expanse, #3)

by James S.A. Corey

His teeth were uncorrected and gray at the gums. It was an affectation of wealth, a statement that he was so powerful mere cosmetics was beneath him. She felt a hot rush of scorn. He was like an old cargo cultist; imitating the empty displays of power and no idea what they really meant. She was reduced to dealing with him, but at least she had the grace to be embarrassed by it.

There are no souls, Melba thought with a touch of pity. We are bags of meat with a little electricity running through them. No ghosts, no spirits, no souls. The only thing that survives is the story people tell about you. The only thing that matters is your name.

Tilly picked up a packet of the oat mush, wrinkled her lip at it, and flicked it away with her fingers. It sat spinning next to her head like a miniature helicopter. “Annie,” Tilly said. “If I wanted to suck vile fluids out of a flaccid and indifferent tube, I’d have stayed on Earth with my husband.”

When asked about Armageddon, she’d tell her parishioners that God Himself had been pretty circumspect on the topic, so it didn’t do much good to worry about it. Have faith that God will do what’s best, and avoiding His vengeance against the wicked should be the least compelling reason for worship. But the truth was that she’d always had a deeply held disagreement with most futurist and millennialist interpretations. Not the theology itself, necessarily, since their guess at what the end times prophecies really meant was as good as anyone else’s. Her disagreement was primarily with the level of glee over the destruction of the wicked that sometimes crept into the teachings. This was especially true in some millennialist sects that filled their literature with paintings of Armageddon. Pictures of terrified people running away from some formless fiery doom that burned their world down behind them, while smug worshipers—of the correct religion, of course—watched from safety as God got with the smiting. Anna couldn’t understand how anyone could see such a depiction as anything but tragic.

This was the part the millennialists never put in their paintings. They loved scenes of righteous Godly vengeance on sinful mankind. They loved to show God’s chosen people safe from harm, watching with happy faces as they were proved right to the world. But they never showed the aftermath. They never showed weeping humans, crushed and dying in pools of their own fluids. Young men smashed into piles of red flesh. A young woman cut in half because she was passing through a hatchway when catastrophe hit. This was Armageddon. This is what it looked like. Blood and torn flesh and cries for help.

“I did it,” she said. “I killed him. I thought I had to. I told him to look at the readout so that he’d bend, so that he’d bend his neck, and he did. And I—and I—and I— Oh, God, I’m going to puke.” “Trashy people puke,” Tilly said. “Ladies are unwell.” It made her laugh.

Show a human a closed door, and no matter how many open doors she finds, she’ll be haunted by what might be behind it. A few people liked to paint this drive as a weakness. A failing of the species. Humanity as the virus. The creature that never stops filling up its available living space. Hector seemed to be moving over to that view, based on their last conversation. But Anna rejected that idea. If humanity were capable of being satisfied, then they’d all still be living in trees and eating bugs out of one another’s fur. Anna had walked on a moon of Jupiter. She’d looked up through a dome-covered sky at the great red spot, close enough to see the swirls and eddies of a storm larger than her home world. She’d tasted water thawed from ice as old as the solar system itself. And it was that human dissatisfaction, that human audacity, that had put her there.

“I ran away from her until she had a seizure, and then I taped her to a chair. Not very heroic.” “I’m getting a medal for falling into a pressure hatch, sacrificing an arm and a leg to keep seven sailors from being trapped in a compromised part of the ship. I was unconscious at the time, but that doesn’t seem to matter. Heroism is a label most people get for doing shit they’d never do if they were really thinking about it.”

Tilly laughed. She pulled a cigarette out and lit it as they walked. At Anna’s shocked look she said, “They let you do it here. Lots of the Belters do. They obsess over air filters and then suck poisonous particulates into their lungs recreationally. It’s a fabulous culture.”

“Don’t be flip,” Anna said, and was gratified when Bull straightened a little in his walker. In her experience, most strong-willed men had equally strong-willed mothers, and she knew how to hit some of the same buttons.