The fight for survival made everything either resilient or forgotten. — James S. A. Corey

“You’re not picking a fight with the things that made the protomolecule. You’re picking a fight with whatever killed them. Orders of magnitude above the things that were orders of magnitude above us. You’ve got to know this is going to escalate if we keep using these technologies.”

“We were always going to keep using these technologies. That was inevitable the moment we opened the gates,” Duarte said. “If you’ve studied any history at all, you know that. Never in human history have we discovered something useful and then chosen not to use it.”

He lifted the gun.

“Wait!” Singh said. “Wait. Do you believe all that? About what killing me is supposed to achieve?”

“I am an officer of the Laconian Empire, Governor Singh. I believe what I’m told to believe.”

“‘The predictable limits of a conceptual framework,’” Bobbie said. A phrase from her classroom on Olympus Mons. “It’s always where to hit the enemy. Whoever they turn out to be. When I learned how to do things like this, we were thinking about Earthers and pirates.”

Katria laughed. “When I taught myself how to do this, I was thinking of people like you. Strange how the wheel turns.”