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6ed4b24
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His smile was curious and as serene as a well-fed predator.
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James S.A. Corey |
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66e4b5a
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The dog-faced, small-cocked, hypocrite bastard son of a weasel and a whore bowed and escorted his wife from the house.
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James S.A. Corey |
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3991a12
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The bartender--Chip--said, "Had a few too many of my margaritas?" "The first one was too many," Holden replied, then climbed under the booth looking for the terminal. "And calling that a margarita should be illegal." "It's as margarita as it gets with rice wine and lime flavor concentrate," Chip said, sounding vaguely hurt."
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James S.A. Corey |
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14f5998
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If all that was possible, everything was.
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James S.A. Corey |
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bd13dbf
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The detective had been watching the video of Julie Mao's fight with her captors over and over again while they'd waited on Naomi and Amos to finish their work. It gave Holden the disquieting feeling that Miller was storing the footage in his head. Fuel for something he planned to do later.
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James S.A. Corey |
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88cfc0a
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It's the basic obstacle of artificial ecosystems. In a normal evolutionary environment, there's enough diversity to cushion the system when something catastrophic happens. That's nature. Catastrophic things happen all the time. But nothing we can build has the depth. One thing goes wrong, and there's only a few compensatory pathways that can step in. They get overstressed. Fall out of balance. When the next one fails, there are even fewer p..
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James S.A. Corey |
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5b1deae
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I hope he knows what he's doing, trusting delicate work like this to agents of chaos like us." Amos" --
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James S.A. Corey |
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f068cc6
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ja mina nousivat kuolleista ja halventaa kohtalo pakottaa minut ja siskoni...
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James S.A. Corey |
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2232b3f
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Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, but it is the mother of any number of other things as well: sacrifice and monstrosity and metamorphosis. Necessity is the mother of all necessary things, to coin a tautology.
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James S.A. Corey |
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7e786a6
|
Well", Holden said, his voice grim, "we have a major problem. We're out of coffee."
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James S.A. Corey Abaddon's Gate |
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4f027a7
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An idealist. The most dangerous kind of man there was.
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James S.A. Corey |
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48a72c0
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wasn't built to fix shit humanity broke," Miller said. "I didn't come here to open gates for you and get the lockdown to let you go. That's incidental. The thing that made me just builds roads. And now it's using me to find out what happened to the galaxy-spanning civilization that wanted the road." "Why"
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James S.A. Corey |
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33f146d
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She had seen Holden on the newsfeeds and reports. At the beginning of the war between Mars and the Belt, he had been the most important man in the solar system, and the celebrity, while it had waxed and waned over the years, had never gone away. James Holden was an icon. For some, he was the symbol of the triumph of the single ship over governments and corporations. For others, he was an agent of chaos who started wars and threatened stabil..
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James S.A. Corey |
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2371b8b
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They're all fucking men," she said. "Excuse me?" Soren said. "The generals. They're all fucking men." "I thought Souther was the only--" "I don't mean that they all fuck men. I mean they're all men, the fuckers."
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James S.A. Corey |
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be8e1d6
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No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito. So
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James S.A. Corey |
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b2ee228
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There had to be a moment, some decision that you made, and before it, you were one person, and after it, someone else.
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James S.A. Corey |
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8172ee4
|
She had seen Holden on the newsfeeds and reports. At the beginning of the war between Mars and the Belt, he had been the most important man in the solar system, and the celebrity, while it had waxed and waned over the years, had never gone away. James Holden was an icon. For some, he was the symbol of the triumph of the single ship over governments and corporations. For others, he was an agent of chaos who started wars and threatened stabil..
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James S.A. Corey |
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31769c7
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You crazy," Jianguo said. "No crew in there. They'll jump you." "Yep." "Then why?" "Because," Amos said, standing up and throwing the towel over his shoulder, "I hate waiting." As"
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James S.A. Corey |
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81e5077
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Seemed like a fact of the universe that the closer you got to anything, the worse it looked. Take the most beautiful person in the solar system, zoom in on them at the right magnification and they were an apocalyptic cratered landscape crawling with horrors. That's what the Earth was.
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James S.A. Corey |
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872c469
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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 Jupite..
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James S.A. Corey |
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6949512
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Dawkinsian
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James S.A. Corey |
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bd352c7
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Later," Amos said, "when you're wishing we had this stuff, I am going to be merciless in my mockery. And then we'll die." Holden"
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James S.A. Corey |
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f1b7019
|
So either panicking amateurs or something critical to defend," Holden said. A metal canister the size of a fist rolled through the gateway, clanking. Amos picked the grenade up casually and tossed it back through the doorway. The detonation lit the room, the report louder than anything Prax had ever heard before. The ringing in his ears redoubled. "Could be both," Amos shouted conversationally from very far away."
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James S.A. Corey |
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8deb78f
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No fame and glory for you, Cortez. Montezuma wasn't impressed by your fire stick this time." "Everything"
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James S.A. Corey |
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6984109
|
Holden was starting to feel like they were all monkeys playing with a microwave. Push a button, a light comes on inside, so it's a light. Push a different button and stick your hand inside, it burns you, so it's a weapon. Learn to open and close the door, it's a place to hide things. Never grasping what it actually did, and maybe not even having the framework necessary to figure it out. No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito. So
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James S.A. Corey |
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f57aaf1
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Naomi shrugged with her hands, then started pulling her hair behind her head and tying it up with a red elastic band.
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James S.A. Corey |
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2c05bf2
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Saber rattling we've done before," she said. "We've survived it. It's a known quantity. I have a binder with nine hundred pages of analysis and contingency plans for conflict with Mars, including fourteen different scenarios about what we do if they develop an unexpected new technology. The binder for what we do if something comes up from Venus? It's three pages long, and it begins Step One: Find God." Errinwright"
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James S.A. Corey |
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4523325
|
The usual state of nature is recovering from the last disaster," she said. It was a truism of ecological biologists, and she said it the way a religious person might pray." --
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James S.A. Corey |
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3265598
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You have allied yourself with stupid, violent men, and you are trying to convince yourself that being stupid and violent will work. That makes you stupid too. I will never help you. I'll fight you now." Cortez"
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James S.A. Corey |
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0562891
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positioning Medina Station as the logical location for a fledgling League of Planets-type government, he at least had the good sense not to say it out loud.
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James S.A. Corey |
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837a86d
|
So are you conscious?" The alien robot--the skin the Miller construct was using--shrugged. It was strange how well the gesture translated. "Don't know. Seems like I'm acing my Turing test, though." Elvi"
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James S.A. Corey |
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25418ad
|
Yes, ma'am," Soren said. "But I was wondering whether you should alert the security service about your decision to clear the sergeant. They do like to be in the loop on that kind of thing." "Meow meow cry meow meow," Avasarala said. "That's all I heard you say." "Yes, ma'am," Soren said. Bobbie"
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James S.A. Corey |
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6e701fe
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Conspiracy theories come up whenever people feel like the universe is too random.
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James S.A. Corey |
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2bd98a0
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said something obscene.
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James S.A. Corey |
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5b3e6e2
|
I can get you some stimulants if you'd like, but there's no coffee." "Right," Holden said. "No coffee. This is a terrible, terrible planet. Show me how to make everyone better."
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James S.A. Corey |
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5994ec6
|
In Amos' experience the more dangerous any two people were, the more carefully polite their social interactions tended to be. The loud, blustering ones were trying to get the other guy to back down. They wanted to stay out of a fight. The quiet ones were figuring out how to win it. "Tatu,"
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James S.A. Corey |
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cbc2c92
|
She was going to see a world in the aftermath of utter disaster, but she would still see it. And the state of nature was always recovering from the last disaster. "Stop,"
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James S.A. Corey |
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456747f
|
Humans, Havelock knew from long experience, were first and foremost social animals, and he himself was profoundly human. It was more romantic--hell, more masculine--to pretend he was an island, unaffected by the waves of emotion around him. But it wasn't true, and he'd made his peace with that fact. When
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James S.A. Corey |
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b528f36
|
No one lived forever. But you fought for every minute you could get.
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James S.A. Corey |
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8bb2b7b
|
He imagined himself landing on the station, and Miller saying, James Holden, you and only you in the universe have the correct chemical composition to make a perfect wormhole fuel!
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James S.A. Corey |
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4fd881f
|
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.
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James S.A. Corey |
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46e74b3
|
Falling awake.
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James S.A. Corey |
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6764a05
|
he talked about shifting strategies like they were the middle part of metamorphosis. Apparently when a caterpillar makes a cocoon, the next thing it does is melt. Completely liquefies. And then all the little bits of what used to be caterpillar come back together as a moth or a butterfly or something. Finds a different way to assemble all the same pieces and make it something else." "Sounds like the protomolecule." "Huh. Yeah. Guess it kind..
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James S.A. Corey |
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b7d15a7
|
History was drenched in blood. But it also had cooperation and kindness, generosity, intermarriage.
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James S.A. Corey |