Leviathan Wakes Quotes
"If you see anything out there that seems off, don’t play hero again. Just pack up the toys and come home."
"Like everything else humans built for space travel, it was designed to be efficient, not pretty. That always made Holden a little sad. There should be room for aesthetics, even out here."
"Kids?" "No," Miller said. "But I’ve got a divorce about that old."
"It was a simple mental exercise. Look at the facts without judgment."
"The décor was pure Belt—old-style ships’ folding tables and chairs set into the wall and ceiling as if the gravity might shut off at any moment."
"This message is to whoever ordered the destruction of the Canterbury, the civilian ice freighter that you just blew into gas. You don’t get to just fly away, you murderous son of a bitch."
"Okay, so, now we need to think about surviving after the hit. If they’re looking to cripple us before boarding, they’ll take out our drive and our comm array."
"You are going to get the remaining four members of your crew to safety. And that’s all. When we’re safe, you can go on your crusade."
"You already tried to goad them into killing us with that broadcast. Now you want to chase them? And what will you do if they let you catch them? Broadcast another emotional plea?"
"Yes, you’re in charge. That makes me XO, and it’s the XO’s job to tell the captain when he’s being an idiot. You’re being an idiot, sir."
"If we had it, you know the Earthers were workin’ on it too."
"Anyone who came out here and didn’t put environmental systems above everything else died young. All us still out here are the ones that cared."
"Selective effect? You’re seriously arguing in favor of selective effect? I never thought I’d hear that shit coming out of you."
"You grew up where the water’s maybe dirty, but it falls out of the sky for you. The air’s filthy, but it’s not going away if your door seals fail. It’s not like that out here."
"That prick Holden? The one in the broadcast? He just declared war on Mars for us."
"We all know what’s coming. We know dance starting, now, like pow, right? They fucked tu agua, and we all know the answer. Out an airlock, no?"
"I’m going to find you and end you. But before I do, I am going to make you explain."
"The difference in environment has changed the Belters so much that instead of just being a bunch of skinny obsessive-compulsives, they aren’t really human anymore."
"This adventure of yours is all about freedom and self-reliance, but surely there’s still room in there to be considerate."
"If you don’t do as we say, we’ll get rid of your toys. If you don’t write. If you don’t come home. If you don’t love us."
"Thank you so much for dropping yet another turd onto my day. I can’t believe how selfish and petty and crude you are."
"I’m sorry we’ve been so estranged these last few years. I hope you can see that the decisions I’ve made were never meant to hurt either of you."
"This is not a joke. This is not one of your mother’s drama fits. I have solid information that the Belt is about to be a very unsafe place."
"Goddamn, Boss, I’d give my left nut for food that didn’t look like a dildo."
"We’ll just learn to live with each other’s stink."
"We don’t go through a day without something happening in the Belt that would make a daddy scared for his precious little flower."
"I’m projecting my self-loathing onto him. It’s just a stroke of luck that I actually wound up hurting the right person."
"The Coalition has been stepping on the necks of the people out here for over a hundred years now. I didn’t like being the boot."
"No. I didn’t switch sides. I stopped playing. I didn’t renounce my citizenship. I like Montana. I’m out here because I like flying, and only a Belter rust trap like the Canterbury will hire me."
"The tax break for eight adults only having one child allowed them to own twenty-two acres of decent farmland. There are over thirty billion people on Earth. Twenty-two acres is a national park."
"It’s all fun and games till someone shoots back."
"Flying around in these metal bubbles, and then trying to poke holes in each other. You ever seen what long-term decompression and cold exposure does? Breaks all the capillaries in your eyes and skin. Tissue damage to the lungs can cause massive pneumonia followed by emphysema-like scarring."
"Men, women. Animals. Kids. Once he’d held a woman’s hand while she bled to death. He’d killed two people, could still see them die if he closed his eyes and thought about it."
"Preliminary scans suggest that the explosion was the result of a failed attempt to connect a nuclear device to the docking station."
"Why would we? It’s Mars and the Belt going at it."
"The time was coming that Mars wasn’t going to ignore them anymore. And when Mars took action, it wouldn’t matter if Earth followed suit. It would be the first real war in the Belt."
"Maybe 5 percent, maybe less, were the ones who sucked it up, learned the lesson, and moved on. The Julies. The good ones."
"I had a little visit with an OPA agent tonight. He was trying to talk me into dropping my kidnap job. I think… I think he’s nervous. I think he’s scared."
"By the time he was in motion, Gomez was firing from a new location. One of the boarders on the deck pointed a large weapon toward the muzzle flash from Gomez’s gun. Gomez and the crate he’d been taking cover behind disappeared in fire and shrapnel."
"The Martian navy isn’t going to ask about the Scopuli. They know good and well what happened to the crew. They planted the Scopuli."
"You don’t go to the suspect and ask where they think you should look next."
"Our first priorities are safety and continuity of services. If what you’re doing isn’t directly related to that, there are better things for you to be doing."
"Stop being a pussy, get your ass out there, and catch bad guys."
"Making sure it doesn’t happen was for people like him, Muss, even Shaddid."
"He couldn’t judge how dangerous the truth was until he knew it—which was itself a fine reason to keep going."
"The idea of that much weight for a single megabyte of data struck him as decadent."
"I don’t care, just give me half a g and stay off the radio till I say so."
"Amos woke up screaming during the procedure."
"The mechanic was moaning and holding on to the edge of the couch with a death grip."
"For the first time in a long time, no one followed."
"I’ve got a ship with guns on it now, and the next time someone orders me to do something, I’m using them."
"Jim, they make these things not to be fiddled with. The civilian version of this device fuses itself into a solid lump of silicon if it thinks it’s being tampered with. Who knows what the military version of the fail-safe is? Drop the magnetic bottle in the reactor? Turn us into a supernova?"
"See, this is why I can't ever be in command."
"If you had an impossible engineering job that needed to be done in the Belt, and you could afford it, you hired Tycho."
"The beautiful thing about losing your illusions, he thought, was that you got to stop pretending."
"All the years he’d told himself that he was respected, that he was good at his job, that all his sacrifices had been made for a reason fell away and left him with the clear, unmuddied knowledge that he was a functional alcoholic who had pared away everything good in his own life to make room for anesthetic."
"This isn’t a coup. Earth is pulling out of here, we aren’t pushing."
"There’s a third alternative. Civilized society has another way of dealing with things like this. A criminal trial."
"The only one who might have any respect for him at all was Havelock, an Earther. It was peaceful, in its way. He could stop making the effort to keep up appearances."
"Flying from consumer to consumer without hitting a supply in the middle was a good way to not cover your docking fees."
"Literally meaning 'no longer a workhorse,' its first entry was as the name of Don Quixote’s horse."
"Access gone, service gun confiscated—though he still had a couple of drops in his hole—money running out."
"No one who flew for a living was claustrophobic."
"We deserve some comfortable beds and decent food and a chance to blow off steam. Don't try to make us feel bad for taking it."
"The people who killed our ship keep doing whatever it is they're doing is making me nuts."
"Sometimes we talk about Jesus Christ. Sometimes we talk about cooking."
"I'm the person with the gun, so do what I say."
"Cops don’t carry small, easily concealable machine guns and ambush people from stairwells. We call those death squads."
"Okay," the woman said. "Those people just tried to kill us. Why did they do that?"
"The cops will be here soon," Miller said. "I need to make a call or we’re all going to jail."
"I wanted to talk to you," Miller said. "I’m looking for someone."
"Here?" Miller said. Something like emotion trickled into his veins. Not hope, but dread.
"Stay away from people. Don’t spread the bug."
"Safe on Eros. Sent up the flag. Hope the home office is watching."
"I just slept for THREE WEEKS. Didn’t even get up to pee. What does that?"
"Damn. I can feel it. I’m hot all the time, and I’m starving."
"Get out of the room. Into the hall. Do it now."
"I didn’t leave," he said. "Those are the civilians back there. The dead guys downstairs jumped them in the lobby."
"That may not be our big problem," Miller said, but before he could explain, a new voice cut in, drowning out the emergency-response loop.
"Okay, everybody! We’re Eros security, que no? We got an emergency, so you do what we tell you and nobody gets hurt."
"I wouldn’t go wherever he’s sending people," he said. "I really wouldn’t."
"If there’s no radiation danger, then I agree," she said with a nod.
"You’d think they’d make the maintenance corridors tall enough for Belters to work in," she said irritably.
"History lesson later," he said. "Let’s figure a way off this rock."
"This thick fucker right here is a couple million volts. That’d melt your shit down real good."
"It’s a shitty and uncomfortable hiding spot. You have my permission to now shut up about that."
"Why do you think a bunch of Ceres mobsters are moving everyone to radiation shelters when there’s no actual radiation danger?"
"We leave you to the gangsters and the three of us get jobs on Tycho and live happily ever after," Naomi said.
"It means we’ll be bleeding from our rectums in about six hours," Holden said. "We have to get to the ship. It’ll have the meds we need."
"It wasn’t until now, walking through the corridors of Eros, that he’d taken joy in it."
"These two just broke our getaway plan," Naomi replied.
"You aren’t coming along. You stay here with Amos and Alex."
"You don’t want to do that, man," the fake cop said.
"Next time I just use the card I took off your body."
"Incubators," Miller said, nodding in agreement.
"Let’s get back to the ship before we bleed to death, right? No more shooting people if we can help it."
"I’m guessing there’s a lot more people need to be shot before this is over," he said.
"Every emotion he’d shut down, every human contact he’d spurned, every love and friendship and moment of compassion from which he’d turned had taken him a degree away from himself."
"We’re dead," he said, and sat down on the edge of a fern-filled planter.
"It’s a petri dish. They don’t know what that shit that killed Julie does, and this is how they’re finding out."