<n>Standard disclaimer<fn></n> This is the fifth book of the <i>The Expanse</i> series. The book starts with a Belter raid on a Martian base on Callisto. A 15-year-old named Filip leads the raid. He is forced to leave a man behind, but the mission is otherwise a success. They'd managed to capture the stealth shielding from the Martians and made it look like a botched raid on a different warehouse. The <cite>Rocinante</cite> is back at <cite>Tycho Station</cite>, this time for a half-year of repairs and upgrades. Amos heads to Earth to take care of an old friend's affairs (Lydia has died). Alex heads for Mars to try to patch things up with his ex-wife. Naomi gets a message from the OPA that her son Filip is in trouble. She takes off without telling even Holden where she's going. The crew is scattered to the winds. Holden remains behind, overseeing the repairs---and taking up tools himself to keep himself busy. Amos takes care of business in Baltimore, eventually meeting with his old partner Erich, who helps him out, but doesn't want anything else to do with him. Amos is too dangerous to have around. <bq caption="Page 125">The pleasantries were just ritual, but ritual was important. In Amos’ experience the more dangerous any two people were, the more carefully polite their social interactions tended to be. The loud, blustering ones were trying to get the other guy to back down. They wanted to stay out of a fight. The quiet ones were figuring out how to win it.</bq> Amos heads to a U.N. prison where they're keeping Clarissa. With Avasarala's help, he gets in to see her and is visiting with "Peaches" when the first rock hits the Earth. But I'm getting ahead of myself a bit. On Mars, Alex is rejected pretty quickly. He looks up Bobbie, who's working for Avasarala on an investigation into what's rotten on Mars. She's on the trail of massive hardware disappearance in the Martian Navy. Alex helps her investigate, trying to use his connections in the Martian Navy, but not really getting anywhere. Bobbie and Alex barely survive an attack but now know that they're on to something. Naomi meets up with old friends on Ceres and we learn a bit of her backstory. She was married to Marco Inaros, a ruthless Belter rebel who used her code to destroy a ship with 234 souls on board. Naomi eventually tried to kill herself by walking out an airlock, but ran away from Marco and Filip instead. Naomi ends up buying her son a ship, which he promptly siezes and gives to his father. Naomi is taken captive and forced to watch as Marco executes his master plan: he has accelerated three asteroids onto a collision course with Earth, but also coated them with Martian cloaking plating to help them evade Earth's defenses. The three rocks slam into planet Earth, eventually killing billions. Marco Inaros is supposedly fighting for the survival of Belters. Fred Johnson puts it bluntly, <bq caption="Page 57">Fred took another pull of his drink before he answered. “Their position is that the Belter culture is one adapted to space. The prospect of new colonies with air and gravity reduces the economic base that Belters depend on. Forcing everyone to go down a gravity well is the moral equivalent of genocide.”</bq> Much later, Marco Inaros puts it into his own words. <bq caption="Page 362">“Once upon a time there were a people who lived on moons and asteroids and the planets where life didn’t evolve. But then we found the gates, and those people died out because we didn’t need them. It’s why I have to do this. You don’t like my methods. I understand that. But they’re mine, and the cause is righteous.”</bq> This reminds me of the fight to preserve deafness. They work to overcome their lack of hearing and become better in other ways. But could we become better in those ways without becoming deaf? Can we have the side effect without the main one? Can we have discipline in youth without the military or corporal punishment? It's a legitimate question, even if the answer is no. Evolution is a blunt instrument. There are perhaps more efficient ways of getting to the advantages we desire. Holden meanwhile is following a hunch about missing ships. These ships are the ones that the Martian splinter group headed by Duarte is collecting for its own purposes, but also to donate to their new allies in Marco Inaros's Free Navy. Holden loops in Alex, who eventually heads out on a lead with Bobbie in the <cite>Razorback</cite>. Duarte and Inaros are convinced that they're going to win, that they'll get their way, but Fred Johnson isn't so sure. <bq caption="Page 379">Fred smiled. “I don’t know what to think yet. I won’t until I know more about the enemy. But looking back through history, there are a lot more men who thought they were Alexander the Great than men who actually were.”</bq> Their overall plan is multi-pronged. Alex and Bobbie are detected and their ship disabled by the Free/Martian Navy. Holden and Fred are on the hunt for who's a traitor on Tycho, but they eventually lose the protomolecule sample to an attack. Earth has been grievously wounded, half of Mars's Navy is under Duarte's control. The Belters are loose and causing trouble, Tycho is disabled, and Duarte has the protomolecule. With no small amount of trouble, Amos and Clarissa make their way out of the depths of the prison and up to the surface. They start walking to Baltimore to get help from Erich. Clarissa uses her implants to save Amos's life and to get them supplies and bicycles to speed up their trip. They get to Erich, but he's reluctant to see that his empire is doomed. <bq caption="Page 315">“Shit, I grew up like this. All these folks are just playing catch-up. Thing is, we’re humans. We’re tribal. More settled things are, the bigger your tribe is. All the people in your gang, or all the people in your country. All the ones on your planet. Then the churn comes, and the tribe gets small again.”</bq> Clarissa tells Erich to get them to a rich-person's compound/island-chain where she knows they can get a private rocket off-planet. They use helicopters to get there, Amos, Erich, and Clarissa finally manage to repair the one rocket that's still there, and they lift off with the house staff in a hail of gunfire, defending themselves from the local security forces. Erich and Amos part ways once again, with Clarissa headed to the <cite>Rocinante</cite>, where Amos will vouch for her, but it will be tough going (that comes a bit later). Meanwhile, Naomi figures out that Marco and the Free Navy have planted a version of her old sabotage program on the <cite>Roci</cite> and she manages to figure out how to warn Holden about it. She is punished severely for this, but manages to escape in a suit-less spacewalk to the ship she'd given Filip, the <cite>Chetzemoka</cite>. Filip and Marco thinks that she's committed suicide, but she's survived, only to discover that the ship had been converted to a bomb with all outgoing communication disabled except for a distress message from her asking for help. The <cite>Rocinante</cite> and the <cite>Razorback</cite> both converge on the <cite>Chetzemoka</cite> to save Naomi. <bq caption="Page 442">[...] you know what the rules are? That we stop and help. Even if she’s not someone we know. Even if it was someone else’s voice. That’s the rule, because out here, we help each other. And if we stopped doing that because we’re more important or because the rules don’t apply to us anymore, I can make a decent case that we’ve stopped being the good guys.”</bq> Naomi manages to alter the signal enough that they are warned off, then escapes in a flimsy spacesuit with barely any air, but still manages to get picked up by Bobbie and Alex. Everyone is once again safe and sound and reunited. Naomi is exonerated, as is Clarissa. Amos is still the baddest of bad-asses with absolutely all of the best lines. See the citations below---especially the last several---for some good examples. The crew of the <cite>Rocinante</cite> manages to save the day and get back together. Earth is picking up the pieces. The Free Navy takes over Medina Station, Duarte takes control of his ships and heads off for Laconia, but the Barkeith, the largest of the ships, disappears forever, going “Dutchman” in a mysterious event that seems to be swallowing some ships. <hr> <ft>Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you.</ft> <h>Citations</h> <bq caption="Page 21">Holden ignored him. “The thing you should be remembering is the magic bullet that stopped it all.” “The artifact was a lucky find for you, given what was —” “No, it wasn’t. It was the scariest fucking answer to Fermi’s paradox I can think of. Do you know why there aren’t any Indians in your Old West analogy? Because they’re already dead. The whatever-they-were that built all that got a head start and used their protomolecule gate builder to kill all the rest. And that’s not even the scary part. <b>The really frightening part is that something else came along, shot the first guys in the back of the head, and left their corpses scattered across the galaxy. The thing we should be asking is, who fired the magic bullet? And are they going to be okay with us taking all of the victims’ stuff?</b>”</bq> <bq caption="Page 57">Fred took another pull of his drink before he answered. “Their position is that the Belter culture is one adapted to space. The prospect of new colonies with air and gravity reduces the economic base that Belters depend on. Forcing everyone to go down a gravity well is the moral equivalent of genocide.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 125">The pleasantries were just ritual, but ritual was important. In Amos’ experience the more dangerous any two people were, the more carefully polite their social interactions tended to be. The loud, blustering ones were trying to get the other guy to back down. They wanted to stay out of a fight. The quiet ones were figuring out how to win it.</bq> <bq caption="Page 136">The systems that the gate network had opened up were scattered across what everyone was pretty sure was the Milky Way galaxy. Cartography was still working out their relative locations, but even the initial findings put some of the new systems tens of thousands of light-years from Earth and with some distinct weirdness about time and location. Confronted by such unimaginably vast distances, it was easy to forget how much space was in just one solar system. Until you tried to find something in it.</bq> <bq caption="Page 177">Once Fred explained the problem, it took three hours to set up a rig that would capture the glow coming from the scattered screen and an hour more to get the computer to understand its new task. The properties of light coming off extrasolar dust clouds were apparently very different from a busted terminal display. Once the expert systems were convinced that the problem fit inside their job description, the lab went to work matching polarizations and angles, mapping the fissures in the surface of the display, and building a computational lens that couldn’t exist in the physical world.</bq> <bq caption="Page 234">“Sometimes you don’t get redeemed,” she said, and her voice made it clear she’d thought about the question. Tired and strong at the same time. “Not every stain comes out. Sometimes you do something bad enough that you carry the consequences for the rest of your life and take the regrets to the grave. That’s your happy ending.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 246">“A code and a cipher. Cipher, you encrypt text so that no one can tell what the words in the message are. A code, you say the words right out in the open, but you change what they mean. Anyone with a smart computer and a lot of time can break a cipher. No one can break a code.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 306">Give him another twenty years, he could run the solar system. Maybe more.”</bq> What a laughably nonsensical thing to say. <bq caption="Page 307">“Bullshit. Closure? You lost. It’s closed. You only say it wasn’t finished because you hadn’t won yet. I left. I sacrificed everything because having nothing away from you was better than having it all and being your puppet.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 315">“Shit, I grew up like this. All these folks are just playing catch-up. Thing is, we’re humans. We’re tribal. More settled things are, the bigger your tribe is. All the people in your gang, or all the people in your country. All the ones on your planet. Then the churn comes, and the tribe gets small again.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 315">The town had been a decent size last week. Cheap little houses on narrow streets, solar panels on all the roofs sucking in the sunlight, back when there had been some. There were still people here and there. Maybe one house in five or six where the tenants were waiting for help to come to them or so deep in denial that they thought staying put was an option. Or they’d just decided they’d rather die at home. As rational a decision as any other, things being what they were.</bq> <bq caption="Page 323">He understood the flaw in that logic: if comforting them comforted him, maybe comforting him comforted them, and they could all drive the ship into a rock while they smiled at each other.</bq> Still, everyone's happy. Sometimes that's the best you can hope for. <bq caption="Page 362">“Belters. All Belters. It’s for Filip. So when his turn comes, there’s still a place for him. Not just a footnote. Once upon a time there were a people who lived on moons and asteroids and the planets where life didn’t evolve. But then we found the gates, and those people died out because we didn’t need them. It’s why I have to do this. You don’t like my methods. I understand that. But they’re mine, and the cause is righteous.”</bq> This reminds me of the fight to preserve deafness. They work to overcome their lack of hearing and become better in other ways. But could we become better in those ways without becoming deaf? Can we have the side effect without the main one? Can we have discipline in youth without the military or corporal punishment? It's A legitimate question, even if the answer is no. Evolution is a blunt instrument. There are perhaps more efficient ways of getting to the advantages we desire. <bq caption="Page 379">Fred smiled. “I don’t know what to think yet. I won’t until I know more about the enemy. But looking back through history, there are a lot more men who thought they were Alexander the Great than men who actually were.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 395">“All right. How are you still alive?” “Practice,” Amos said cheerfully.</bq> <bq caption="Page 396">“Then what do I get out of it?” “You get out of here,” Amos said. “Place was kind of a shithole before someone dropped the Atlantic on it. It’s not getting better.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 401">“This attack is the greatest tragedy in human history,” Avasarala said, her voice deep and throbbing. She dominated the screen. “But it was carried out by shortsighted, narcissistic criminals. They want a war? Too bad. They get an arrest, processing, and a fair trial with whatever lawyer they can afford. They want the Belt to rise up so they can hide behind the good, decent people who live there? Belters aren’t thugs, and they aren’t murderers. They are men and women who love their children the same as any of us. They are good and evil and wise and foolish and human. And this ‘Free Navy’ will never be able to kill enough people to make Earth forget that shared humanity. Let the Belt consult its own conscience, and you’ll see compassion and decency and kindness flourish in any gravity or none. Earth has been bloodied, but we will not be debased. Not on my fucking watch.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 430">“It doesn’t feel right. He’s the kind of man who carries a lot of weight in a small circle. Playing at this scale isn’t what he does best. He isn’t a bad tactician, and the timing of the attacks was showy in a way that seems like he was likely behind them. And he’s charming at the negotiating table. But…” “But?” “But he’s not a first-class mind, and this is a first-class operation. I don’t know how to put it better than that. My gut says that even if he’s taking credit for it, he has a handler.” “What would your gut have said before the rocks dropped?” Fred coughed out a laugh. “That he was an annoyance and a small-time player. So yes, it may just be sour grapes on my part. I’d rather think I was outplayed by someone who’s a genius at something grander than self-mythologizing.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 432">“He’s playing a short-run game. Yes, his stock’s high right now, and probably will be for a little while. But he’s standing in the way of the gates. All of this is to stop people from going out and setting up colonies. But the hunger is already out there. Smith couldn’t stop Mars from depopulating itself. Avasarala couldn’t put the brakes on the process, and God knows she tried. Marco Inaros thinks he can do it at the end of a gun, but I don’t see it working. Not for long. And he doesn’t understand fragility.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 432">There’s a faith in the technology. In the idea of maintaining an artificial ecosystem. We’re able to grow food on Ganymede, so they think humanity’s freed from the bonds of Earth. They don’t think about how much work we had to do for those crops to grow. The mirrors to concentrate the sun, the genetic modifications to the plants. The process of learning to build rich soil out of substrate and fungus and full-spectrum lights. And backstopping all of that, the complexity of life on Earth.</bq> <bq caption="Page 442">[...] you know what the rules are? That we stop and help. Even if she’s not someone we know. Even if it was someone else’s voice. That’s the rule, because out here, we help each other. And if we stopped doing that because we’re more important or because the rules don’t apply to us anymore, I can make a decent case that we’ve stopped being the good guys.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 454">“Did he think I was joking about something? ’Cause I was just telling him how the sun comes up in the east.” Peaches lifted a shoulder. “In his mind, we’re the good guys. Everything we say, he interprets that way. If you say you don’t care if he lives or dies, it must be your dry gallows humor.” “Seriously?” “Yep.” “That’s a really stupid way to go through life.” “It’s how most people do.” “Then most people are really stupid.” “And yet we made it to the stars,” Peaches said.</bq> <bq caption="Page 485">“Here’s the thing,” Amos said. “If you did go in there, you might feel like you had to do something. And then I might feel like I had to do something. And then we’d all be doing things, and we’d all wind up having a worse day, just in general.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 499">“If the Belters fall in line with this Free Navy thing, it’s going to be because they’re all out of any other kind of hope. The new systems and colonies —” “Have erased their niche,” Avasarala said. “And that’s shitty, and maybe we could have found a way to support them. Put them on some kind of cooperative basic, but they put a cherry bomb up the ass of the largest functioning ecosphere in the system, and it’s going to be a while before handing them free food’s going to be an option for me, practically or politically.”</bq>