Leviathan Wakes

Highlights

Page 396

His hole was on the eighth level, off a residential tunnel a hundred meters wide with fifty meters of carefully cultivated green park running down the center. The main corridor’s vaulted ceiling was lit by recessed lights and painted a blue that Havelock assured him matched the Earth’s summer sky. Living on the surface of a planet, mass sucking at every bone and muscle, and nothing but gravity to keep your air close, seemed like a fast path to crazy. The blue was nice, though.

Page 543

“Someone went through the shutdown procedures,” Amos said. “The reactor wasn’t killed by the blast, it was turned off afterward. No damage that I can see. Don’t make sense. If everyone is dead from the attack, who shut it down? And if it’s pirates, why not take the ship? She’ll still fly.”

Page 583

Ceres at night was indistinguishable from Ceres in the daytime. There had been a move, back when the station first opened, to dim and brighten the lights through the traditional human twenty-four-hour cycle, mimicking the spin of Earth. The affectation had lasted four months before the council killed it.

Note: I thought this is something we need.

Page 55

But self-preservation’s a man’s first duty. And natives don’t mind dying, you know. They don’t feel about it as Europeans do.’

Page 722

“Your file says you were busted out for assaulting a superior officer,” Lopez said. “That’s pretty cliché, Holden. You punched the old man? Seriously?” “No. I missed. Broke my hand on a bulkhead.” “How’d that happen?” “He was quicker than I expected,” Holden replied. “Why’d you try?” “I was projecting my self-loathing onto him. It’s just a stroke of luck that I actually wound up hurting the right person,” Holden said.

Note: Decent dialogue

Page 820

Havelock shook his head again, this time in mild disbelief. If he’d been a Belter, he’d have made the gesture with his hands, so you could see it when he had an environment suit on. Another of the hundred small ways someone who hadn’t grown up on the Belt betrayed himself.

Page 483

Miller pulled up his hand terminal and took in the basics. His heart wasn’t in it. “Hey, Muss,” he said. “I got a question.” “Fire away.” “You’ve got a case you don’t want solved. What do you do?” His new partner frowned, tilted her head, and shrugged. “I hand it to a fish,” she said. “There was a guy back in crimes against children. If we knew the perp was one of our informants, we’d always give it to him. None of our guys ever got in trouble.” “Yeah,” Miller said. “For that matter, I need someone to take the shitty partner, I do the same thing,” Muss went on. “You know. Someone no one else wants to work with? Got bad breath or a shitty personality or whatever, but he needs a partner. So I pick the guy who maybe he used to be good, but then he got a divorce. Started hitting the bottle. Guy still thinks he’s a hotshot. Acts like it. Only his numbers aren’t better than anyone else’s. Give him the shit cases. The shit partner.” Miller closed his eyes. His stomach felt uneasy. “What did you do?” he asked. “To get assigned to you?” Muss said. “One of the seniors made the moves on me and I shot him down.” “So you got stuck.” “Pretty much. Come on, Miller. You aren’t stupid,” Muss said. “You had to know.” He’d had to know that he was the station house joke. The guy who used to be good. The one who’d lost it.

Note: Good reveal. He seemed competent but we’re only seeing his perspective.

Page 621

It had been the most complex, difficult feat of mass-scale engineering humanity had ever accomplished until the next thing they did.

Page 795

“This is going to be tough,” she said. “We’re facing something harder than anything we’ve had to do before. I need a team I can trust with my life. Extraordinary circumstances. You understand that?” “Yeah,” he said. “I got it. I’ll stop drinking, get myself together.” “Miller. You’re not a bad person at heart. There was a time you were a pretty good cop. But I don’t trust you, and we don’t have time to start over,” Shaddid said, her voice as near to gentle as he had ever heard it. “You’re fired.”

Page 861

“All of the war drums ignore that. It’s the elephant in the room. Anyone who doesn’t live on a spaceship is structurally vulnerable. Tycho, Eros, Pallas, Ceres. Stations can’t evade incoming missiles. And with all of the enemy’s citizens living at the bottom of huge gravity wells, we don’t even have to aim particularly well. Einstein was right. We will be fighting the next war with rocks. But the Belt has rocks that will turn the surface of Mars into a molten sea.

Page 881

“You’re the ace in the hole. You four people are the only eyewitnesses to the destruction of both ships. When the trial comes, I need you and your depositions. I have influence already through our political contacts, but you can buy me a seat at the table. It will be a whole new set of treaties between the Belt and the inner planets. We can do in months what I’d dreamed of doing in decades.” “And you want to use our value as witnesses to force your way into the process so you can make those treaties look the way you want them to,” Holden said. “Yes. And I’m willing to give you protection, shelter, and run of my station for as long as it takes to get there.” Holden took a long, deep breath, got up, and started unzipping his suit. “Yeah, okay. That’s just self-serving enough I believe it,” he said. “Let’s get settled in.”

Page 287

The economics of the Belt had moved on. Ceres Station had spun up with newer docks, more industrial backing, more people. The commerce of shipping moved to Ceres, while Eros remained a center of ship manufacture and repair. The results were as predictable as physics. On Ceres, a longer time in dock meant lost money, and the berth fee structure reflected that. On Eros, a ship might wait for weeks or months without impeding the flow of traffic. If a crew wanted a place to relax, to stretch, to get away from one another for a while, Eros was the port of call. And with the lower docking fees, Eros Station found other ways to soak money from its visitors: Casinos. Brothels. Shooting galleries. Vice in all its commercial forms found a home in Eros, its local economy blooming like a fungus fed by the desires of Belters.

Note: I unironically love discussion of docking fees and the effects it has.

Page 745

“I need to make very, very sure I understand what you’re saying,” Holden said as the big one—Amos—returned and sat at his other side holding the bagel. “Are you saying that unless I let you on my ship, your friend is going to keep us here? Because that’s blackmail.” “Extortion,” Amos said. “What?” Holden said. “It’s not blackmail,” Naomi said. “That would be if he threatened to expose information we didn’t want known. If it’s just a threat, that’s extortion.”

Page 135

Maybe it was a cumulative process, like smoking cigarettes. One didn’t do much. Five didn’t do much more. 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. Until now, he’d been able to kill men with impunity. To face his impending death with a denial that let him make plans and take action.

Note: Feels a bit like telling instead of showing

Page 755

“I haven’t accused anyone of doing anything,” Holden said. “I’m not building a case. I just put the data out there. Now it’s not a secret. They’re doing something on Eros. They don’t want it interrupted. With Mars and the Belt shooting at each other, everyone with the resources to help is busy elsewhere.” “And you just dragged Earth into it,” Miller said. “Maybe,” Holden said. “But the killers did use ships that were built, at least in part, at Earth’s orbital shipyards. Maybe someone will look into that. And that’s the point. If everyone knows everything, nothing stays secret.”

Note: This character is intellectually challenged

Page 145

Holden sat and watched the video display the end of the solar system in vivid color and with expert commentary. He kept waiting for the streaks of light to begin descending on the planet itself, for the domes to fly apart in nuclear fire, but it seemed someone had kept some measure of restraint, and the battle remained in the sky. It couldn’t stay that way forever. “You’re telling me that I did this,” Holden said. “That if I hadn’t broadcast that data, those ships would still be alive. Those people.” “That, yeah. And that if the bad guys wanted to keep people from watching Eros, it just worked.”

Note: Holden is as dumb as he looks

Page 390

Naomi was right. It would be so easy to see Belters as alien. Hell, if you gave them time to develop some really efficient implantable oxygen storage and recycling and kept trimming the environment suits down to the minimum necessary for heat, you might wind up with Belters who spent more time outside their ships and stations than in. Maybe that was why they were taxed to subsistence level. The bird was out of the cage, but you couldn’t let it stretch its wings too far or it might forget it belonged to you.

Page 556

Eight days later, the message came. The cargo ship Guy Molinari had arrived, full up with OPA soldiers. Havelock’s coordinates had been verified. Something was sure as hell out there, and it appeared to be collecting the tightbeamed data from Eros. If Miller wanted to be part of this, the time had come to move out.

Note: This makes no sense. How did they detect the tight beam?

Page 067

“I know. You think it’s monstrous, but I am saving the human race. I am giving humanity the stars. You disapprove? Fine. Let me ask you this. Can you save Eros? Right now.” “No,” Fred said, “but we can —” “Waste the data,” Dresden said. “You can make certain that every man, woman, and child who died on Eros died for nothing.” The room was silent. Fred was frowning, his arms crossed. Holden understood the struggle going on in the man’s mind. Everything Dresden said was repulsive and eerie and rang too much of the truth.

Note: Same issue using nazi research

Page 165

“They say drinking helps, but it doesn’t,” Miller said. “No?” “Nope. Sex sometimes, if you’ve got a girl who’ll talk to you after. Or target practice. Working out, sometimes. Liquor doesn’t make you feel better. Just makes you not so worried about feeling bad.”

Page 909

“When you were in the navy,” she finally said, “what were you supposed to do when someone went crazy on the ship? Started doing things that endangered everyone?” Thinking they were talking about Miller, Holden said, “You restrain him and remove him as a danger to the ship and crew. But Fred didn’t—” Naomi cut him off. “What if it’s wartime?” she said. “The middle of a battle?” “If he can’t be easily restrained, the chief of the watch has an obligation to protect the ship and crew by whatever means necessary.” “Even shooting him?” “If that’s the only way to do it,” Holden replied. “Sure. But it would only be in the most pressing circumstances.” Naomi nodded with her hand, sending her body slowly twisting the other way. She stopped her motion with one unconscious gesture. Holden was pretty good in zero g, but he’d never be that good. “The Belt is a network,” Naomi said. “It’s like one big distributed ship. We have nodes that make air, or water, or power, or structural materials. Those nodes may be separated by millions of kilometers of space, but that doesn’t make them any less interconnected.” “I see where this is going,” Holden said with a sigh. “Dresden was a madman on the ship, Miller shot him to protect the rest of us. He gave me that speech back on Tycho. Didn’t buy it then either.” “Why?” “Because,” Holden said. “Dresden wasn’t an immediate threat. He was just an evil little man in an expensive suit. He didn’t have a gun in his hand, or his finger on a bomb trigger. And I will never trust a man who believes he has the right to unilaterally execute people.” Holden put his foot against the bulkhead and tapped off just hard enough to float a few feet closer to Naomi, close enough to see her eyes, read her reaction to him. “If that science ship starts flying toward Eros again, I will throw every torpedo we have at it, and tell myself I was protecting the rest of the solar system from what’s on Eros. But I won’t just start shooting at it now, on the idea that it might decide to head to Eros again, because that’s murder. What Miller did was murder.” Naomi smiled at him, then grabbed his flight suit and pulled him close enough for a kiss. “You might be the best person I know. But you’re totally uncompromising on what you think is right, and that’s what you hate about Miller.” “I do?” “Yes,” she said. “He’s totally uncompromising too, but he has different ideas on how things work. You hate that. To Miller, Dresden was an active threat to the ship. Every second he stayed alive endangered everyone else around him. To Miller, it was self-defense.” “But he’s wrong. The man was helpless.” “The man talked the UN Navy into giving his company state-of-the-art ships,” she said. “He talked his company into murdering a million and a half people. Everything Miller said about why the protomolecule is better off with us was just as true about Dresden. How long is he in an OPA lockup before he finds the jailer who can be bought?” “He was a prisoner,” Holden said,…

Note: Good dilemma

Page 403

Mars would survive, for a while. Pockets of the Belt would hold out even longer, probably. They had a culture of making do, surviving on scraps, living on the bleeding edge of their resources. But in the end, without Earth, everything would eventually die. Humans had been out of the gravity well a long time. Long enough to have developed the technology to cut that umbilical cord, but they’d just never bothered to do it. Stagnant. Humanity, for all its desire to fling itself into every livable pocket it could reach, had become stagnant. Satisfied to fly around in ships built half a century before, using technology that hadn’t changed in longer than that. Earth had been so focused on her own problems that she’d ignored her far-flung children, except when asking for her share of their labors. Mars had bent her entire population to the task of remaking the planet, changing its red face to green. Trying to make a new Earth to end their reliance on the old. And the Belt had become the slums of the solar system. Everyone too busy trying to survive to spend any time creating something new. We found the protomolecule at exactly the right time for it to do the most damage to us, Holden thought.

Page 547

Eros still had spin gravity but didn’t have gravity from the massive acceleration it was under. Miller chose not to try to figure that out.

Note: Because if it was any other way Miller couldn’t move

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