Cibola Burn

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

Once is never. Twice is always.

There’s a dignity in consequences.

Later, when you're wishing we had this stuff, I am going to be merciless in my mockery. And then we'll die.

Last man standing," Amos replied with another grin. "It's in my job description.

The mechanic had laid out two suits of their Martian-made light combat armour, a number of rifles and shotguns, and stacks of ammunition and explosives. “What,” Holden said, “is all this?” “You said to gear up for the drop.” “I meant, like, underwear and toothbrushes.

—it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out— One hundred and thirteen times a second, nothing answers and it reaches out. It is not conscious, though parts of it are. There are structures within it that were once separate organisms; aboriginal, evolved, and complex. It is designed to improvise, to use what is there and then move on. Good enough is good enough, and so the artifacts are ignored or adapted. The conscious parts try to make sense of the reaching out. Try to interpret it.

A person can fail the people they love just by being who they are.

And ... and what is civilisation if it isn’t people talking to each other over a goddamned beer?

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

Choosing to stand by while people kill each other is also an action,

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.

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.

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. To make sense of what she saw. To comfort herself. To give the world some sense of purpose or meaning. Species rose in an environment, and that environment changed. It was the nature of the universe, as true here as it had been on Earth.

You’re cranky because you’re tired,” Amos said. “You got that I-have-to-save-everyone hangup, so I make it that you haven’t slept in about two days. But listening to people bitch? Yeah, that’s sorta your job. It’s why you make the big money.” “We make the same money.” “Then I guess you’re doing it for the fame and glory.” “I hate you,” Holden said.

Captain,” Amos said with mock surprise. “Have you actually learned from your past? Is this a new thing you do now?

If you start feeling wonderful and powerful and like you’ve seen the face of God, you’re having a euphoric attack.

What happened?" she asked. "The landing pad blew up." "Oh," she said. And then, "do they do that?" "No. No, they really don't.

Stop making me fall in love with you, Cap, we both know it can’t go anywhere.

Apocalyptic explosions, dead reactors, terrorists, mass murder, death-slugs, and now a blindness plague. This is a terrible planet. We should not have come here.

It’s not that bad. Conspiracy theories come up whenever people feel like the universe is too random. Absurd. If it’s all an enemy plot, at least there’s someone calling the shots.

People used to think gold was worth fightin’ over, and that shit gets made by every supernova, which means pretty much every planet around a G2 star will have some. Stars burn through lithium as fast as they make it. All the available ore got made at the big bang, and we’re not doin’ another one of those. Now that’s scarcity, friend.

Sure, humans had invaded an extra-dimensional space with wormholes to points scattered across the galaxy, but they'd remembered to bring ferns.

You know,” Naomi said, “if you’re looking at hundreds of people burning to death as a problem solving itself, that may be more evidence that you’re on wrong side.

The moral high ground is a lovely place. It won’t stop a missile, though. It won’t alter the trajectory of a gauss round.

If Miller had brought him all this way just to let him die in an abandoned train car, it was the longest prank setup in history.

You want a shadow, you got to have light and something to get in its way.

I love the period of rotation. Thirty hours. You can get in a full day’s work, stay up getting drunk at the saloon, and still get a full night’s sleep. I don’t know why we didn’t think of this back home.

Oh good,” Amos replied. “Somebody got killed there. That’s how we claim stuff, you know. This planet is officially ours now.

A guy I once knew tried to justify his life choices to me by comparing himself to Genghis Khan.” “I take it you didn’t find his argument compelling?” Murtry asked with a smirk. “No,” Holden said. “And then a friend of mine shot him in the face.” “An ironic rebuttal to an argument about necessary violence.” “I thought so too, at the time.