#tiamat's wrath spoilers
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#i mean they ~bond towards the end of tw hence the half#expanse spoilers#the expanse spoilers#the expanse book spoilers#technically he Did shoot someone in the face for trying to take teresa#it's sooo funny how protective he is when cortazar trying to kill her was his idea#technically he never intended for her to get hurt but#tiamat's wrath spoilers#leviathan falls spoilers#kinda#shitty phone edit for a shitpost <3
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SPOILERS for a book from 2019 but killing both Bobbie and Amos in the span of seven chapters is actually evil.
#tiamat's wrath#the expanse spoilers#the expanse book series#finally found time to read the last three books#tiamat's wrath spoilers
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"Some of that light had been traveling for centuries. Millennia. Longer. Many of those stars would have died long before she was born. What a weird fate for a photon to be spat out of a nuclear fireball, speed through the vast emptiness between stars, and land on a Martian Marine's retina while she decided whether she still feared death, or if she was ready. She'd done this a dozen times before."
— Tiamat's Wrath, The Expanse
#the expanse#the expanse spoilers#tiamat's wrath#spoilers#bobbie draper#i cannot#no#sorry for this but i have to process this somehow
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Im about half way through tiamat’s wrath and I’m screaming. Vague spoiler under the cut…
They made me think he died off screen and then I was so happy to have him back and then they killed me on screen and my delayed emotional processing ass is still trying to process this tragedy.
I’m simultaneously watching the tv series and I was just commenting to my partner how much I love his character and im dead
If they bring it back after the time jump I don’t think I could handle seeing it on screen on a screen
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nolden for the ship bingo
LISTEN THEY ARE JUST SO GOOD!!!!! what a lovely, mature relationship between adults, who learn and grow together and talk things out. they desperately need therapy though. especially after [redacted for tiamat's wrath/leviathan falls spoilers]
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Just finished Tiamat's Wrath, it's one of my favorite books so far (spoilers ahead)
What I love so much about this one is that it de-centers Holden who I always found to be kinda boring and just stumbles into saving everyone even though overall he's kind of a bland basic dude. It makes space for Leader of Everything Naomi who is so wildly far from the 1 dimensional perfect gf of the first book. Her character development is so satisfying, especially starting in Nemesis Games. I love Leader of Everything Naomi.
Some of my favorite moments:
-"Her father scowled, then farted like the blare of a trumpet."
-Weekend at Bernie's Duarte scene when they try to do a scan of him and dress and pose him like a puppet, its so comical. Weekend at Bernie's Duarte is also Psychadelic Trip Duarte, who is also Psychedelic Trip Vaporizing Duarte? He's a total space cadet the entire time like he's not even mad he just blows cortazar's atoms apart like a dandelion.
-The very first mention of "Timothy." RISE OF AMOS YES
-Every conversation Amos has with Theresa. The way he speaks with her like a grown up,or at least with respect, is surprisingly touching. "Nutless" lol killed me.
-Wolverine Amos saves everyone. I was genuinely sad when I thought he was dead before.
-Everyone accepts that Amos has a freaky alien body now like oh hey Amos- freaky alien body now, huh? Okay cool nbd. Cool dog. Group hugs.
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✨zahli's 2023 book tracker 📚📕📙📗📘
i've been tracking these on discord but ig they can go here too!
Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb #1) - Tamsyn Muir [169k]
Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb #2) - Tamsyn Muir [193k]
Nona the Ninth (The Locked Tomb #3) - Tamsyn Muir [179k]
These were an adventure, you can never quite predict wtf is going to happen next. Honestly I prefered the premise of the first and wanted to see Gideon and Harrow go on to be an awesome necromantic pair which (spoilers) is not quite what happens. The whole thing goes very off the rails and is simultaneously a lot of fun but also a little unsatisfying when the story doesn't go anywhere you thought it might.
Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir [171k]
Highly highly recommend this, I suggest going in with minimal information. Man in rocket in space. Science fiction. Enjoy!
Persepolis Rising (The Expanse #7) - James S. A. Corey [174k]
Tiamat's Wrath (The Expanse #8) - James S. A. Corey [184k]
Leviathan Falls (The Expanse #9) - James S. A. Corey [183k]
These were re-reads - I was fairly sure I hadn't read the final in the series so I backtracked a couple to catch up. By the time I got to the end I realised I HAD in fact read all of them! I feel like the last couple of book started posing some really interesting questions that the series as a whole entirely failed to answer. It was a good re-read, but I think the trailing questions were why I wasn't sure I had actually finished it before. It feels a little like the ending was planned at the start and didn't quite grow with the rest of the series. Still, there's a lot to enjoy in the series and I will at some point go back and re-read from the start.
Red, White and Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston [132k]
I devoured this in about 3 seconds flat and had a hell of a good time. Surprisingly less internal conflict than I had expected, a lot of fun, really loved all the little friendship groups.
Children of Time (Children of Time #1) - Adrian Tchaikovsky [176k]
This was a lot of fun - it follows two narratives - a generation ship from a dying earth and a world seeded by a fancy nanovirus that was intended to bootstrap monkeys back up to a human society but instead...activated spiders. It felt a little slow going back and forth as the spiders slowly slowly advance and the humans are periodically awoken and put back into cryo sleep, but it was worth it. Interesting exploration of both sides and then ofc they meet up towards the end.
Next on the agenda: Children of Ruin (this one has cephalopods!), then perhaps Children of Time. Then I think Witch King by Martha Wells because I'm dying to read some more fantasy at this point and I adore murderbot so this should be good. I did start The Cloud Roads and never finish it though, so we'll see. Perhaps the Priory of the Orange Tree instead because dragons!!
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expanse spoilers (Babylon, Persepolis & Tiamat) under cut
one thing I'm wondering about regarding space battles in the expanse is that if you have a railgun and know where the other ship's reactor is, don't you instantly win the fight? I mean it's not like there's anything that can stop a railgun shot fully penetrating a ship including the reactor and I can't imagine it's that easy to hide where the big thing creating radiation is, especially since literally all military ships are part of a production line. hell, even just the cqb gatling guns can fully penetrate any ship
so during the battle for Sol in Persepolis Rising, right, they're hitting the Tempest with many cqb rounds and railgun shots, even if the torpedos can't get through, they dodge some shots and the Sol fleet don't know where the Tempest's reactor is. aside from the fact that a decent chunk of the Tempest's crew should've gotten shredded, given that while the outer hull can heal itself, the shots still fully penetrate (you know, like Shed way back in Leviathan Wakes and that guy from Bobbie's entering commando in Tiamat), how unlikely is it, that a random shot didn't hit the reactor, instantly rendering the unstoppable Tempest virtually useless? this goes for pretty much all space battles in the expanse actually, but I think they didn't forget about that in the pre-Persepolis books. Iirc the Pella did in fact get hit in the reactor by Bobbie's scattered salvo. but the Laconion frigates that defended the fuel transport to the Tempest from the Storm's ambush in Tiamat's Wrath didn't hit the reactor core of the freighter either, even though that would've 100% killed the entering commando and stopped the resistance from getting the anti-matter fuel pellets
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Outer science appearing on the do you like this vocaloid song poll a few months ago made me think about the Eyes of Wrath AU again so here's some ramblings
Warnings: HW spoilers, Coils of Bahamut spoilers, mentions of torture
Ava and Nidhogg mesh extremely well, even more so than est*nien and Nidhogg. Their goals and thoughts align to the point that it can be difficult for Nidhogg to tell which thoughts are his and which thoughts are Ava's. This, along with how Nidhogg isn't possessing her but rather working in tandem, is how Ava is able to maintain hold over their body if she so chooses.
Even outside of "Foulques dies" routes, Eyes of Wrath has the potential to happen because the reason why Ava's mental state is so tattered is because of Coils of Bahamut. She's Going Through It after having to kill her god. She had to face the truth and kill Bahamut, meanwhile the Ishgardian clergy is aware of their sins but gladly continue their war against Ishgard. How is this right? That's why Fetters of Lament (The conversation with Tiamat) is the crossroads which determines whether Ava chooses to take Nidhogg's eyes and continue his vengeance or not. Does she listen to Tiamat's words and not let grief take hold of her? Or does seeing her other god doomed to an eternity of sorrow push her over the edge?
Thordan is kept alive -- albeit barely. He's alive purely out of sadism and to fulfill their desire for revenge. Nidhogg wants him to suffer for eternity just as he has while Ava takes pleasure in his terror and despair.
I know it would be hotter if Aymeric were kept alive instead of Thordan but Aymeric is just too noble. He would accept his fate for the sake of Ishgard, he would try to reason with her and could not hate Ava outright. He's no fun as a captive. He's removed just enough from the legacy of bloodshed.
Eyes of Wrath Ava has some weird psychosexual shit going on, which is one of the differences between her and Nidhogg's thoughts. Nidhogg hates it so much, they will be terrorizing Ishgard and then suddenly he finds that their body is saying some absolutely obscene. The Belial-Beelzebub dynamic.
By the way, 'Sormr is... relatively fine with this all. In his internal conflict over his duty to Hydaelyn vs his ties to his children, he has basically outsourced his power and his choice to Ava. He doesn't directly involve himself in the Dragonsong war as a combatant, but granting his gift to Ava is what has made her able to do all this "fuse with Nidhogg take on a semi-draconic form" stuff.
#outer science is so chuuni i love it. im sorry anyone whos actually into kagepro I only know small bits#𝟎𝟎𝟑. ––––– 𝐕𝐄𝐑𝐒𝐄 . ›› eyes of wrath .#my posts#ava drangahr
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im still not over naomi seeing resurrected essentially amos with his black eyes and gray skin and just thinking it's fascinating bc her relief he's back outweighs everything
#reading tiamat's wrath /#tiamat's wrath spoilers#oh he's been brought back by some aliens yeah sure no problem#i love him more than that#they're all in love with each other idc#poly roci rights
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The expanse books un
THE EXPANSE BOOKS UN FULL
Most adapted material has an uncomfortable relationship with its source. You’ll at least get an idea of the characters and whether you like them. The status quo described doesn’t last very long, but it’s enough to get you going. I’d say that covers the first book, and first two seasons of the show in the most general fashion I dare provide. In the show he is played by Thomas Jane, just so you know we're discussing high-quality entertainment here. There is also a detective who wears a lame trilby hat but has even worse future hair underneath. The three factions hate each other and war could break out at any moment.įrom this general setting, events I won’t spoil put together a ragtag crew of folks, give them a ship, and make them the ongoing center of an evolving conspiracy that is alien in origin but made lethal thanks to layers of human greed, stupidity and politics.
THE EXPANSE BOOKS UN FULL
The Belters have all evolved into tall skinny people who can barely survive in full gravity and have to live on whatever scraps they can get. Mars hates Earths’ supposed superiority and is all about building a super-strong military. Rather than one big happy human family, these civilizations away from Earth have developed their own identities and cultures. I don’t believe they go much further that because it’s all awful dead space and would take too long anyway.īesides, there is trouble enough with just half a solar system. Beyond that, people live in/on “The Belt”, the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, as well as some of Jupiter’s moons. Earth is still the center of human existence, but we also occupy Mars. THE EXPANSE is a political science fiction story set in a future in which humans have harnessed high-speed space travel, but in a small way relative to other science fiction properties. The story remains the same regardless of how you get it. But even without that drama, the show has a fairly enthusiastic fanbase, eager to tell you it’s one of the best science fiction shows you can watch. The Amazon season popped out in December, so it’s still relatively new. Part of that is because it made news when Amazon rescued the show from cancellation by buying it from Syfy at the end of its third season. More often, however, I hear about the EXPANSE television series. Naming device aside, they are very attractive books that look fetching all in a row at the bookstore and not on my Kindle. They all have titles like BABYLON’S ASHES and TIAMAT’S WRATH, which all sound cool but tell you nothing about the book itself. I have no idea what the current books are called either. It doesn’t have a name yet, but that doesn’t matter. There are currently eight with a ninth final novel supposedly coming out this year. Corey, who is actually two writers: Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck - have been around since 2011. Within my particular orbit, THE EXPANSE frequently shows up as both. There is so much noise out there when it comes to books you should read and shows you just have to watch. Everyone be cool, I’m doing this WITHOUT spoilers…
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"His name was Timothy. He was my best friend." lines that make you want to scream and rend your garments!! Teresa, baby girl, my beloved!!
"Was Timothy ever really my friend?" "If he said he was your friend, then he was. Amos wasn't a man who felt the need to lie very often." Holden as prisoner of war, baby boy, my poor little meow meow!! Also teresa is your daughter now no take backs.
#the expanse#tiamat's wrath spoilers#teresa duarte#teresa and muskrat my beloveds#rip timmy you were a real one#jk no rest for the wicked#anyway this book did make me want to die a little bit#amos got better after this and holden Didn't#leviathan falls spoilers#just to be safe#im so sad about holden spending the whole last book basically PTSD'd out of his entire personality until the end#james holden
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Muse and Knight
Warning: this fanfic contains major spoilers through Tiamat’s Wrath.
AO3
Summary: The transition from uneasy allies to family doesn’t happen in a single moment. Not even a dramatic one. It’s a slow change, like a sunset. You can’t see it happening, just see the results when it’s already happened.
Holden and Clarissa’s relationship, through the years.
The coffee machine was broken. Again. Holden pressed his forehead into the cool brushed steel surface of the machine. “I don’t ask for much. Really, I don’t. Is this so unreasonable?” The red text of the error message shown even through his closed eyelids. It seemed almost irritated at him for expecting it to perform the function that was the entire purpose of its existence.
The galley door slid open. “Oh,” a soft voice said. Clarissa hovered at the galley door.
“Hey,” he said. “You’re up.”
Clarissa seemed to teeter on the edge of leaving. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were awake."
Holden shrugged. "Couldn’t sleep. Figured I’d start shift early. Or, I was going to." He gestured helplessly at the red error message. Holden’s head already ached in anticipation of caffeine withdrawal.
Clarissa frowned and crossed the galley, inspecting the error message. "It’s not working?” She power-cycled the coffee maker and hit the brew button again.
“Already tried that,” Holden said. As if agreeing, the machine buzzed angrily and spat out the same error message as before.
“Hmm. Let me take a look.” Clarissa left, and returned with a bag of tools and parts. A minute later she had the machine on the floor, back panel removed and parts exposed to the open air. Not for the first time, Holden was struck by a sudden sense of surreality. Just a handful of years ago, this woman had tried to destroy him and everyone he loved. He could still remember the murderous rage she’d inspired in him. Now she was fixing his coffeemaker, and he was weirdly ok with that.
He’d like to say that the assault on the slow zone had been the tipping point. The moment when she’d moved in his mind from “person who’d tried to kill him” to “part of his crew.” But these sorts of things never worked like that. It was like a sunrise: you couldn’t see the sky turning from black to blue while it was ongoing. You could only notice the results after they’d already happened.
“Ha!” Clarissa pulled out something metallic and charred, with little dangling wires like tentacles. “Power leads burnt out.”
“Is that hard to fix?"
"No, this part swaps out pretty easy.” She opened a utility organizer labeled Replacement Parts: Galley in neat handwriting that definitely wasn’t Amos’. She pulled out the pristine twin of the burnt out part and wired it into the machine. She put the machine back together, and ran diagnostics. This time the message was a happy green. She made a little animal noise of satisfaction. “There, all fixed.”
Holden clapped her on the shoulder. “You are my favorite person in the solar system.” He turned to the machine and started a new brew. “You want me to make some for you?” When she didn’t answer, he turned to look at her.
There was an odd expression on Clarissa’s face, one his caffeine-deprived mind couldn’t quite decipher. “I… yes, I would love that,” she said.
Weeks later, Holden would learn that Clarissa actually hated coffee. That morning, though, she drank the whole cup.
***
Pátria was a big colony. To Holden, a child of cramped and crowded Earth, that still felt a little strange. Pátria only had a few settlements, and only one that could rate the label ‘city’- barely. But by the fledgling standards of extra-solar colonies, it was a metropolis. It had paved roads and a sewage system and real buildings not made from scrap and mud. And it had recreational swimmers.
The day was uncomfortably hot, the kind of hot that made his shirt damp. A few families with young children were splashing in the local lake on the outskirts of the town. A floating platform had been set up in a deeper part of the lake. One adolescent took a running leap off and cannonballed into the lake, splashing his friends and prompting screams and shouts. A few nearby waterbirds croaked their annoyance and flew off. Holden found himself grinning.
“People do this for fun ?” Bobbie’s voice was acrid with disgust and amusement.
“What, swim? It’s not that uncommon on Earth,” he said.
“Those birds have been pooping in there. And the fish. And whatever the hell kind of microbes they’ve got.”
Holden shrugged. “That’s true on Earth too. People still swim in ponds and lakes there. Remind me to tell you about some of my family’s trips to Flathead Lake.”
She shot him a look. “Yeah, and that's also disgusting. But at least Earth lakes have our flavor of shit and microbes in it. This will have alien shit and microbes in it. Who knows what that does?”
Holden opened his mouth to answer, but Clarissa beat him to it. “They test the water regularly here. It’s not safe to drink without treatment, but you can swim in it just fine. So long as you don’t swallow too much, anyway.” She was taking off her shoes and rolling up her jumpsuit pantlegs as she talked. “I looked it up before we landed.” She set her shoes aside, socks neatly tucked in, and walked purposefully towards the water. It took Holden a second to understand why. Then he grinned and shucked off his own shoes.
Bobbie groaned. “If your feet melt into green slime, don’t come complaining to me,” she called.
They both ignored her. Clarissa was already up to her ankles by the time Holden reached the water. Her face was turned up to the sun like a flower, her expression pure bliss.
“I don’t think I’ve been anywhere near a real lake since I was a kid,” Holden said. The water was delightfully cold. The soft wet sand slid comfortably between his toes.
“Last time I was near a lake was when me and Amos were trying to get off Earth. Not much time for swimming then.”
“And before that?”
“Probably the same lake, the last time I summered there with my parents. We used to go there every other year. It was… nice.” She had the same distant tone she got, discussing her old life. He’d never pressed her much about it. So Holden changed the subject.
“I forgot how good cold water feels on a hot day,” he said. He crouched down and started splashing water on his face, careful to keep his mouth closed as he did so.
Clarissa was digging out handfuls of sand out of the lake bottom and watching them flow through her fingers underwater. “I know. I almost want to just dunk myself in and float for a while."
"But?”
“But I don’t fancy walking around in a soaking wet jumpsuit the rest of the day.”
“Those colonists got their swimsuits from somewhere. We’ve got a few hours. We could go get some. Have some shore leave on the beach.
"You think anyone else will be interested?” Her tone was amused. Holden glanced behind him. Bobbie was still shaking her head at the whole affair in amused disgust. Amos was staring at them with the blank non-comprehension of someone watching a foreign religious ritual. Alex and Naomi were back on the Roci, but he suspected their reaction would be much the same as Bobbie’s. Lake swimming wasn’t something people did outside of Earth- or it hadn’t been until now. And Baltimore didn’t have any bodies of water a sane person would want to swim in. It occurred to Holden that, though Clarissa wasn’t the only other Earther on the crew, she was probably the only one who shared any of his fondness for the place.
“Maybe not,” he said. “Do we need anyone else?”
She smiled. “I guess we don’t.”
By the time they were done at the lake, the day was nearly gone. The two of them walked back to the Roci’s landing pad, chatting animatedly, beneath a sky transitioning from blue to azure to black.
***
When you lived day in and day out with the same people on a small ship, a certain level telepathy emerged. From the tone of Naomi’s humming, or the way Bobbie took a ladder, or the rhythm of Alex’s fingers on the controls, Holden could take a barometer reading of each of his crew. So when Holden saw Clarissa sitting in the galley, gripping her mug of tea in a very particular way, he knew something was very wrong. Unfortunately, the telepathy didn’t tell him why.
To buy himself time, he started making coffee. Holden knew so much detail about his crew personal and work lives that, whatever their mood was, he usually had plenty of context to guess what the cause was. He didn’t know of anything in Clarissa’s life that could be behind her anxious mood. She hadn’t had any fights with the other crew that he knew of. There weren’t any looming mechanical problems or existential threats. He wondered how to go about asking what was bothering her.
Holden sat down at the table across from her. “What’s bothering you?”
Her eyes focused on him, like she’d only just noticed he was there. Then she laughed. “Always the direct approach.”
He grinned and shrugged. “I’m not very good at this.”
She grinned back for a moment. Then it faded. “I got a message from my sister.”
Two thoughts collided in Holden’s head: I thought your sister was dead slammed into I hope she’s doing well and jumbled together in his mind. Just barely, he stopped himself from blurting I hope she’s dead out loud. He knew Clarissa had siblings besides Julie. She never talked about her birth family except in the past tense, so it was easy to forget that most of them were still alive.
“Not good news, I take it?”
“My father is dead.”
The news was like a dropped tool in an empty cargo hold. Her father. Jules-Pierre Mao. The man who had probably held the record for bloodiest hands in the solar system until Marco Inaros came along to steal the title. It was hard for Holden to think of the arrogant man he’d encountered on Luna so many years ago as related to the tired looking mechanic in front of him. The Venn Diagram between the two had so little overlap these days that they were nearly separate circles in his mind. “Um. Wow.” He took a long pull from his coffee. He couldn’t make this about his own feelings right now. “How are you feeling right now?”
She didn’t answer for a long moment, but Holden chose to wait and sip his coffee. He didn’t have to wait long. “When I was young, he defined my life. Father was like a gravity well. So much revolved around him, and you couldn’t pass near him without accounting for how he’d alter your trajectory. Now he’s gone, and it’s hardly worth a story on the news feeds.” She smiled wryly. “He would have hated that.”
Holden frowned into his coffee. “You know, now that you mention it, that’s kind of weird. I mean, yeah, it’s been a while since he was in the news, but he was kind of a big deal back in the day. I’m surprised I haven’t heard more about this.”
“I’m not. He was held in Mossoró when the rocks fell. They were hit bad by tsunamis. They couldn’t find most of the bodies. It’s only now that the courts have made it official.” Clarissa’s voice was so flat, like she was reading off a list.
“So you’ve known this was coming.” Holden wondered if that was the reason for her mood. He could remember one of his grandmothers, who’d been gravely ill for so long before she died that he’d felt more relief at her passing than loss. And with that relief, guilt.
“I suppose I did.” Clarissa cocked her head in bemusement. “I’m surprised you didn’t know that. You’re the one who put him in prison.” There was no hint of reproach in her voice. Almost, they could have been talking about a famous football player whose career Holden hadn’t kept up with.
Holden shrugged. “Honestly, I kind of stopped giving a fuck about him once he was in prison. So long as he couldn’t start wars, I didn’t really care.” Holden winced. “I uh, may not be the most comforting person to talk to about this.”
Clarissa just smiled at him. “I think he’d hate that even more than the lack of news coverage.”
Holden wasn’t entirely sure how to respond to that. “So… You sound pretty calm about this. But I can tell something’s bugging you. Anything you want to talk about?”
Clarissa frowned into her mug. “When I got the message that he was dead, my first thought was 'good.’ I don’t like that.”
Holden took a long sip from his coffee to buy himself time. “No love lost between you two, then?”
“I don’t feel anything about him. No love, no hate. I’m just very, very glad that he’s gone forever now. And I don’t like that I feel that way. I didn’t think I was that kind of person anymore.”
“I mean, to be fair, it makes me a little happy to know he’s gone for good.” Clarissa looked up at him sharply, and he shrugged. “It probably doesn’t speak well of me as a person. But I think it’s just part of being human.”
“Maybe.” She stared at her drink. “I still feel like I’ve failed somehow.”
Holden strongly disagreed. But he knew by now that she didn’t really want him to prove her wrong. Just listen while she worked through it on her own.
And the truth was, Holden could sympathize with her sorrow, but he couldn’t entirely empathize with it. Mao was her father. He understood intellectually why parent-child relationships could fall apart so completely and irreparably that she could react this way. He could agree entirely with the reasons why. He knew that the only right you had with anyone in life was the right to walk away. But he couldn’t really feel it. He had always gotten on well with his own parents. It was hard to imagine anything different.
He took her hand. “Well, for what it’s worth, I like the person you are now,” he said.
“And who do you think that person is?”
“The person who fixes things. The person who won’t let so much as a squeaking hinge stick around for long. The person who builds things.”
She didn’t answer him. She just smiled a small smile. They sat together in companiable silence for a long time.
***
When his interrogators told him about the body on Medina, Holden thought they were lying. Surely, it was a tactic to make him admit something. Surely, the photos and autopsy reports were fake. Surely, they couldn’t have found Clarissa Mao, shot twice amidst a half dozen dead Laconian soldiers. When Holden finally let himself believe them, he waited for them to tell him who else in his family had died. Months, then years passed, and the news never came.
He couldn’t grieve. He couldn’t afford to. If the Laconians knew just how deep a weakness it was, if they understood that she was more to him that a mere crewmate, they’d never stop hammering away at it. So he threw all his efforts into diverting them. He opened up as much as he could on the alien threat. The Tempest anomaly. The Ilus artifact. Elvi Okoye.
When he finally got free, he was too preoccupied to think much about older pain. The flight to the gate, Bobbie’s death, Amos’ strange resurrection: all of these overwhelmed his attention like a well lit room overwhelms a single candle. When the grief reminded him of its presence, it wasn’t how he expected it.
The cabin door squeaked. It was such a soft little sound, it took Holden weeks to notice it. He was so wrapped up in the joy of being back on the Roci, of not being on Laconia, that most other things were background noise. But as time went by, as they passed through the Laconia gate, through the slow zone and into the Gossner system, Holden noticed the small rattling whine of a mechanism not quite in alignment.
“It’s just a squeak.” Naomi shrugged with her hands when he mentioned it to her. “I can have Amos put it on the to-do list, but I guarantee you he’s got a couple dozen other items on it already. This might never make it to the top.”
“I know it’s pretty minor in the grand scheme of things,” Holden said. Experimentally he cycled the door a couple more times to see if the noise was consistent. “I just can’t remember the last time a squeak stuck around this long."
He meant to sound casual. Evidently he failed, because Naomi’s expression softened. "I miss her too.”
Holden sagged a little, like a spring losing tension. “I wanted to believe it was a bad dream. Or a lie to make me admit something. The Laconians sprang it on me suddenly. I think they were trying to surprise me into letting something slip.” He could still remember the feeling like a dunk in ice. Like a confirmation of his worst nightmares.
“Did they tell you how it happened?”
“Some. 'Likely involved in terrorist activities’ was I think how they put it.”
“She saved my life. She saved the whole underground.” And Naomi told him the story of the jailbreak, the traitor, and Clarissa’s last stand.
Holden couldn’t speak. In broad strokes, what Naomi told him wasn’t far off from what he’d already guessed. But he hadn’t fully appreciated just how much he owed to Clarissa’s sacrifice. Naomi’s life was one item at the top of a very long list.
Naomi pulled him into a hug, and Holden broke. His body shook with the quiet sobs that he’d never allowed himself on Laconia. She murmured soothing words whose content mattered less than their tone. He could feel some of her tears wet on his forehead. He wasn’t sure how long they stood there like that. He had the raw sense of having burned a deep infection out of a wound.
“I’ve got a few spare hours,” Naomi said. “I could grab some tools. We could fix it together."
"That,” Holden said, voice still ragged, “would be great.”
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fuck. just hit chapter 32 and 33 of tiamat's wrath and uhhhhhhhhhh Fuck Me
#mar dont read this#shreya dont read this#the expanse spoilers#tiamat's wrath spoilers#vaguing cos i dont want to spoil but 😲😲😲
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AMOS FUCKING “LAST MAN STANDING” BURTON
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Just finished The Vital Abyss. (Spoilers ahead, also for Tiamat's Wrath)
I wish that the authors hadn't created the drug that makes you a psychopath, I feel like it gives Cortázar an out for responsibility for his atrocities. The Dr. Mengeles and Dr. Sims-es of history had no issues experimenting on and torturing human subjects. Cortázar doesn't need a drug to explain his behavior, people are horrible enough on their own.
Even though the main novels are all 3rd person, I thought it worked that this one was first person. The slow self-justification of evil is more compelling in the first person perspective, and more chilling. It reminds me of Remains of the Day.
Also, the end of the story when presumably Duarte tells him he isn't free- it brings another dimension to his situation in Tiamat's Wrath.
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