Cibola Burn

“At least he cares,” Elvi said. “I like him for that.”

“You like everyone,” Fayez teased. It’s your pathology.”

“You don’t like anyone.”

“That’s mine,” he said, grinning.

“Right,” Holden said. “No coffee. This is a terrible, terrible planet.”

From where he was, the fear had stopped being an emotion and turned into an environment.

I hate that it breaks down that way. Your side and mine. One of my teachers back in school always used to say that contagion was the one absolute proof of community. People could pretend there weren’t drug users and prostitutes and unvaccinated children all they wanted, but when the plague came through, all that mattered was who was actually breathing your air.

“Dammit,” Holden said after he’d killed the connection. “You ever get the sense that the universe is out to get you?”

“Sometimes I get the sense that the universe is out to get you,” Amos said with a grin. “It’s fun to watch.”

You can order the sun to come up if you time it right.

Human brains needed an answer, even if they had to make up something they knew was bullshit.

They fought and worked and devised intricate plans to buy more time. Basia had no doubt that they’d work just as hard to keep each other alive for even a few more minutes. It wasn’t something he’d ever had to think about before. But it did seem to be a microcosm of everything in life. No one lived forever. But you fought for every minute you could get. Bought a little more with a lot of hard work.

There was no point to the attack except spite and the kind of violence that passed for meaning in the face of despair.

She isn’t stupid, but she’s learning to fake it.

Dead’s not good, but at least it’s simple.

“Still. Maybe some good can come out of it.”

“I admire your psychotic optimism.”

But, like so many things in life, when you come to the spot where you’re supposed to do the rituals, you do them.

You mean you want me to make it look like you’re doing something while you figure out what to do.

Everything was an artifact of its function. That’s what made evolution so gorgeous.

The engineers groaned and shook their heads. Legal arguments were another phrase for bullshit to them.

“Is that you?” Holden asked in what he was pretty sure was the new universal winner for stupid questions.

It was less fun being the chosen one and prophet when the gods were violent and capricious and their spokesman was insane and powerless.

That was the danger of being old and a politician. Habits outlived the situations that created them. Policies remained in place after the situations that inspired them had changed. The calculus of all human power was changing, and the models she used to make sense of it shifted with them, and she had to keep reminding herself that the past was a different place. She didn’t live there anymore.

“They say revenge is empty.”

“This is my first try at it,” Holden said. “Forgive me if my opinions on it are fairly unformed.”

“We’re the ones who followed the rules here. We came with science teams and a hard dome. We hired them to build our landing platform, and they killed us. We’re the good guys here.”

“And the moral high ground is a lovely place,” Marwick said, as if he were agreeing. “It won’t stop a missile, though.”

There were a lot of holes in that logic that he carefully avoided thinking about.

Some secrets stayed secrets because nobody knew them. Some because nobody told.