<n>Standard disclaimer<fn></n> This is the sixth book of the <cite>The Expanse</cite> series. It starts with Marco Inaros and his Free Navy in charge of the Slow Zone and <cite>Medina Station</cite> in it. Michio Pa is at the heart of the small group of higher-ups in the Free Navy who are beginning to seriously doubt Marco's qualifications and goals. Those goals always seem to change whenever Marco would have had to admit that he'd failed. He managed to destroy billions on Earth, but the blow strikes simultaneously at Belters because they still obtain most of their volatiles and food from Earth. All other operations have failed in one way or another. Filip is also increasingly unhappy with Marco, the Free Navy, and his place in it. He's a spoiled, teenaged, child of divorce, but his instincts aren't wrong. He thinks his mother is dead and finds that he cares. As Fred Johnson says about Marco, <bq caption="Page 84">He’s slaughtered billions of people and remade the shape of human civilization. No one can do something on that scale and see themselves as fully human anymore. He may be a god or he may be a devil, but he can’t stomach the idea of being just an unreasonably pretty man who stumbled into the right combination of charisma and opportunity.</bq> Marco, meanwhile, is employing guerrilla tactics to leave as much territory and population to the "inners" as possible, to increase the burden of people under their care. It doesn't occur to him that them taking care of these people will make his enemies look like the "good guys" to those people---including a lot of Belters. The crew of the Rocinante is helping Earth and Mars pick up the pieces and fight the Free Navy. One part of the effort is to work with Monica on mini-documentaries highlighting the humanity of all people---to show Earthers and Belters that they're all suffering. They hope to show them that they should band together against the guerrilla force that doesn't seem to care about them---and that seems to be more pirate than government. As always, there is the constant reminder of the sheer enormity of space relative to the minor affairs of humans. <bq caption="Page 295">The endless abyss opened around them, a whisper that the universe was larger than his ship. Larger than all the ships put together. Humanity could put its flag on thirteen hundred of those dots and not be a percent of a percent of a percent. That was the empire the inners were fighting and dying to control. A hundred more planets a dozen times over, and less than a rounding error of what was out there staring back at them.</bq> The Ring is an artifact built by an automatic program created by a billions-year-dead civilization. It provides access to a handful of systems, presumably only a fraction of what was once available. All of this is so beyond humanity's own capabilities, it's like giving an iPhone to a <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Yanomamo-Yanomamö-Studies-Cultural-Anthropology/dp/0155053272">Yanomamö</a>. <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080801/">The Gods must be crazy</a>. Prax is back on Ganymede and his team has discovered a way of growing food more quickly for the billions on Earth who no longer have consistent sustenance. The improvements would also benefit the Belt. However, the Free Navy seems to have killed off one of his researchers who was trying to publish the results in public. Prax eventually gets his research out onto the 'net and avoids the reprisals of the Free Navy---because they are by that time too busy saving themselves. Michio Pa's splinter group teams up with Fred Johnson and the inners, partially for protection and partially because of aligned causes. There are various skirmishes that finally end up with Inaros vs. <cite>Rocinante</cite>. The Roci gets the upper hand, but Holden disables missiles that were on target because he saw that Filip was on board. Maybe not his proudest moment. Fred Johnson dies of a stroke because of the high-G maneuvers of the battle. Because of this, Avasarala nominates Holden to attend the "peace" conference with the high-level Free Navy defectors. She personally takes on the task of honing his negotiating and diplomacy skills. <bq caption="Page 321">Strength by itself is just bullying, capitulation by itself is an invitation to get fucked; only mixed strategies survive. Everything is personal, but they know that too. They can smell pandering like a fart. If you treat them like they’re a treasure box where if you just tweak them the right way, the policy you want falls out, you’re already fucked. They’ll misjudge you, so be ready to use that.</bq> Meanwhile ships are still disappearing during ring transit---seemingly randomly---but Duarte sends a bunch through to support the Free Navy and to attack <cite>Medina Station</cite>. The railguns mounted on the alien station take out all of the ships, validating the efficacy of the defenses. Also, a bunch of ships didn't make it through from Laconia---what is going on with the gates? All of this effort and energy put into war is further weakening the Sol System's ability to feed itself---and its colonies that still depend on it for supplies. The other planets largely have completely different biologies and cannot sustain human crops---they are often based on completely different chemistries. Marco's only remaining adviser tells him that their three-year window of sustainability is shrinking rapidly. Naomi comes to the same conclusion, <bq caption="Page 201" author="Naomi">The problem, she thought as she replaced the injection nozzle on the coffee machine, was capacity. They could make anything, but they couldn’t make it all at once. Humanity was going to get by on the minimum until there was a way to increase production, and a lot of people living on the margin wouldn’t make it. They’d die on Earth, yes, but keeping the Belt fed wasn’t going to be trivial either.</bq> But Marco and his inner advisers don't feel the pinch---as his kind never has. <bq caption="Page 202">Probably it wouldn’t come clear until they’d used up everything. Kings were always the last to feel the famine. That wasn’t just the Belt. That was all of history. The people who’d just been going about their lives were the ones who could speak to the actual cost of war. They paid it first. Men like Marco could orchestrate vast battles, order the looting and destruction of worlds, and never run out of coffee.</bq> Sanjrani is the one of Marco's former advisers who's run the numbers the most. He discusses the problem with Michio Pa. <bq caption="Page 308">“We’re fine now,” Sanjrani said. “We’ll be fine for three years. Maybe three and a half. Then the recycling systems stop being able to meet demand. We won’t have infrastructure in place to fill the gaps. And then we’ll starve. Not just Earth. Not just Mars. The Belt too. And once we start, we’ll have no way to stop.” “All right,” Michio said. “How do we fix it?” “I don’t know,” Sanjrani said.</bq> With a tenuous truce between part of the Belt and the Inner planets, Avasarala presses her advantage. They come up with a plan to take back Medina Station by sending a giant ice hauler named <cite>Giambattista</cite> filled with 4000 "ships" (or things that look like ships) that can be deployed to distract the railgun until others can board the station and overwhelm the Free Navy. Simultaneously, they attack other Free Navy bases to keep Inaros busy. Bobbie and Amos lead an attack on the alien station with the railguns and manage to disable them. Filip abandons his father as Marco launches a final 15-ship attack on the Ring to take back <cite>Medina Station</cite> from the <cite>Rocinante</cite>, which is the only ship currently guarding it. Naomi finally notices the pattern that explains all of the ships that went missing in transit, realizing that it is related to and/or caused by the cumulative energy levels of all simultaneous transits. She designs an attack on Marco that sends the <cite>Giambattista</cite>---filled with junk to increase its mass---through a gate at the same time that Marco's 15 ships come through. Therewith they manage to force the energy level high enough to cause Marco's ships to be swallowed up like all of the others. More than before, there is a peace of sorts: instead of Belters having to be worried that their society will die out because of the 1300 worlds, they will head up the Transport Union, an organization headquartered on <cite>Medina Station</cite> and responsible for managing traffic through the gates---to prevent any ships from disappearing. Michio Pa is its first president. <bq caption="Page 521">But it was also a mistake to lose sight of all the individual lives and choices and flashes of pure dumb luck that brought humanity as far as they’d come. History, she thought, was perhaps better considered as a great improvisation. A thinking-through of some immense, generations-long thought. Or daydream.</bq> <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 29">“Belt don’t make good parts,” the harbormaster whined. “We make the best parts there are,” Marco said. “History’s moved on, my friend.</bq> He made that true when he bombarded Earth and destroyed its industrial and lift capacity. But he just moved the baseline down. <bq caption="Page 84">“He’s slaughtered billions of people and remade the shape of human civilization. No one can do something on that scale and see themselves as fully human anymore. He may be a god or he may be a devil, but he can’t stomach the idea of being just an unreasonably pretty man who stumbled into the right combination of charisma and opportunity.</bq> <bq caption="Page 126">The torches flared and died and flared again. The Rocinante was remade a little, the same way it had been over and over through the years. Little changes adding up over time as the ship moved from what it had been to what it would be next. Just like all the people she carried.</bq> <bq caption="Page 131">“We’re not people,” he said. “We’re the stories that people tell each other about us. Belters are crazy terrorists. Earthers are lazy gluttons. Martians are cogs in a great big machine.” “Men are fighters,” Naomi said, and then, her voice growing bleak. “Women are nurturing and sweet and they stay home with the kids. It’s always been like that. We always react to the stories about people, not who they really are.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 146">And in the midst of it all, the great spinning plume of water and ice as the reservoirs vented. The water reserves spun out from the station, briefly echoing the arms of the galaxy and then stopped, thinned, and spread out into the vast darkness of the Belt. Ice lost among the steady brightness of stars.</bq> Since when do Belters waste supplies? <bq caption="Page 168">Father Cesar’s a good man. He’s gentle and he’s kind and he’s funny, and to him Belters are all Free Navy and radical OPA. If someone killed Pallas, he’d be worried about what the drop in refining capacity would do before he thought about how many preschools there are on the station.</bq> <bq caption="Page 187">Marco said. “Send me the tracking data for all of the ships still answering to Pa’s commands. You tell your guard ships at Pallas Witch of Endor’s gone rogue. Jam it, kill it, and send the battle data to us. No mercy for traitors.” Rosenfeld nodded. “And Fred Johnson?” “Butcher will bleed in his turn,” Marco said. “Never fear. This war’s just beginning.”</bq> Whatever ends up happening is what he'd intended. <bq caption="Page 201">The problem, she thought as she replaced the injection nozzle on the coffee machine, was capacity. They could make anything, but they couldn’t make it all at once. Humanity was going to get by on the minimum until there was a way to increase production, and a lot of people living on the margin wouldn’t make it. They’d die on Earth, yes, but keeping the Belt fed wasn’t going to be trivial either.</bq> <bq caption="Page 201">[...] she wondered if Marco had thought about that or if his dreams of glory had swept away any realistic plan for taking care of all the lives he’d disrupted. She had a guess about that. Marco was a creature of the grand gesture. His stories were about the single critical moment that changed everything, not all the moments that came after.</bq> <bq caption="Page 202">Probably it wouldn’t come clear until they’d used up everything. Kings were always the last to feel the famine. That wasn’t just the Belt. That was all of history. The people who’d just been going about their lives were the ones who could speak to the actual cost of war. They paid it first. Men like Marco could orchestrate vast battles, order the looting and destruction of worlds, and never run out of coffee.</bq> <bq caption="Page 228">The universe has plans for you, Josep said in her imagination. You couldn’t have come this far through so many dangers if there weren’t a reason for you to be here. The same beautiful bullshit that everyone told themselves. That they were special. That they mattered. That some vast intelligence behind the curtains of reality cared what happened to them. And in all the history of the species, they’d all died anyway.</bq> <bq caption="Page 252">Fred was quiet for a long time, a sense of mourning blooming in his chest, thick and aching. “Honestly, then? I don’t know how it ends. I don’t even know if it ends. I dedicated my life to this fight. First one side, and then the other. But now, I look at it? What’s happened with the gates. What’s happened to Earth. I don’t recognize this anymore. I keep doing what I can because I don’t know what else to do.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 265">When she died, she wanted it to be like this. Not in a hospital bed like her grandmother. Not in a sad little hole on Mars with a gun in her mouth or a gut full of pills like the failures of veterans’ outreach. She wanted to win, to protect her tribe and wipe the enemy into a paste of blood and dismay. But failing that, she wanted to die trying. A snippet of something she’d once read popped in her head: Facing fearful odds protecting the bones of her fathers and the temples of her gods. Yeah. Like that.</bq> <bq caption="Page 268">A high-speed three-sixty with a precision-timed rail gun shot halfway through the spin wasn’t exactly standard combat tactics for Martian frigates, but she thought her old combat-tactics instructors would have approved.</bq> Dm17 <bq caption="Page 295">The endless abyss opened around them, a whisper that the universe was larger than his ship. Larger than all the ships put together. Humanity could put its flag on thirteen hundred of those dots and not be a percent of a percent of a percent. That was the empire the inners were fighting and dying to control. A hundred more planets a dozen times over, and less than a rounding error of what was out there staring back at them.</bq> The ring is an artifact built by an automatic program created by a billions-year-dead civilization. It provides access to a handful of systems, presumably only a fraction of what was once available. All of this is so beyond humanity's own capabilities, it's like giving an iPhone to a Yanomamo. The Gods must be crazy. <bq caption="Page 299">His father tilted his head to one side. “I just told you that you failed. Now you’re giving me reasons why it’s okay that you failed? Is that how it works?” Filip knew the kind of calm now.</bq> Well, yes. Examining a failure is how you avoid the next one. <bq caption="Page 307">Sanjrani relaxed and pulled up a diagram from the desk’s display. A complex series of curves laid over x and y axes. “We made assumptions when we started this,” he said. “We made plans. Good ones, I think. But we didn’t follow them.” “Dui,” Michio said. “First thing we did,” he said, “was destroy the biggest source of wealth and complex organics in the system. The only supply of complex organics that work with our metabolisms. The worlds on the other side of the ring? Different genetic codes. Different chemistries. Not something we can import and eat. But that was okay. Projections were clear. We could build a new economy, put together infrastructure, make a sustainable network of microecologies in a cooperative-competitive matrix.</bq> <bq caption="Page 308">“We’re fine now,” Sanjrani said. “We’ll be fine for three years. Maybe three and a half. Then the recycling systems stop being able to meet demand. We won’t have infrastructure in place to fill the gaps. And then we’ll starve. Not just Earth. Not just Mars. The Belt too. And once we start, we’ll have no way to stop.” “All right,” Michio said. “How do we fix it?” “I don’t know,” Sanjrani said.</bq> <bq caption="Page 309">She was trying to help. Only when she closed her eyes, she saw the red line sloping down toward nothing, and no upward green swoop to answer it. Three years. Maybe three and a half. But to make it work, they had to start now. Had to have started already.</bq> Ooooh a climate-change analogy. <bq caption="Page 317">He’d missed two full shifts and come in during the middle of the third. Three days, almost, lost in the darkness of the security cell. No lawyer, no union representative. He could have asked for one—should have, by the rules and customs—but the certainty was solid as steel that it would have only meant more bruises. Maybe a broken bone. Vandercaust knew enough of history and human nature to know when the rules weren’t the rules anymore.</bq> <bq caption="Page 318">Being picked up by security, locked away, beaten, interrogated. They didn’t scare him in themselves. They scared him for what they said about how it came next. They scared him because they meant that Medina Station wasn’t a new beginning in history. It was and would be as red in the gutter as everyplace else humanity had set its flags.</bq> <bq caption="Page 321">Strength by itself is just bullying, capitulation by itself is an invitation to get fucked; only mixed strategies survive. Everything is personal, but they know that too. They can smell pandering like a fart. If you treat them like they’re a treasure box where if you just tweak them the right way, the policy you want falls out, you’re already fucked. They’ll misjudge you, so be ready to use that.</bq> <bq caption="Page 325">The whole process had been everything he hated—niggling on details and nuances, fighting over turns of phrase and the order information was presented in, fashioning something that, even where it wasn’t outright false, was tailored to be misunderstood. Politics at its most political.</bq> <bq caption="Page 326">They’ll try embarrassing you a little to see how you react. Don’t try to one-up them, or they’ll try to escalate out of conflicts later. Stay on point.</bq> <bq caption="Page 327">Something will go wrong. Something always does. They’ll see something you didn’t mean them to see; they’ll have a trap set you didn’t know to expect. These are intelligent people, and all of them have their own agendas. When it happens—not if, when—the worst thing you can do is panic. The second worst thing you can do is engage.</bq> <bq caption="Page 363">How many millions of times had people had this exact conversation before? How many wars had put two people together for a moment and then washed them apart? There had to be a tradition of it. A secret history of vulnerability and want and all the things that sex promised and only occasionally delivered. They were just one more couple among all the countless others. It only hurt this time because it was them.</bq> <bq caption="Page 374">Avasarala put out her hands, palms facing each other about a meter apart. “I’ve got a report on you this thick. I know every pimple you’ve popped since your voice broke. Everything. Praiseworthy, shameful, indifferent. Everything. I have violated your privacy in ways you can’t imagine.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 374">Avasarala waved him back, leaned in toward Chen, a smile on her lips. “Inaros isn’t going to chase after the Giambattista and Rocinante, because he’ll be distracted by the largest and most aggressive fleet action in history kicking his balls up into his throat. By the time he understands what we were really after, it’ll be too late for him to do anything but hold his dick and cry. But I need to know that you’re in.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 457">Luring Naomi and her lover out to Medina to be killed was the plan now. But more than that, it had always been the plan. They’d killed Fred Johnson as part of it. They’d abandoned Ceres too. The consolidated fleet’s massive and coordinated attacks had been them falling for his father’s brilliant strategy to lure them out. And if it failed, if something went wrong, that would always have been the plan too. His father’s new generals would change, getting better with every purge. And when it got so foul there was no way to pretend it into victory, it would be someone else who had failed. Maybe Filip.</bq> <bq caption="Page 473">“An unshakable faith in humanity.” “It’s true,” he said, shaking his head. Or maybe nuzzling a little. “Against all evidence, I keep thinking the assholes are outliers.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 476">“You don’t get to know that,” Naomi said. “They did or they didn’t. You didn’t put them out so that someone would send you a message about how important and influential you are. You tried to change some minds. Inspire some actions. Even if it didn’t work, it was a good thing to try. And maybe it did. Maybe those saved someone, and if they did, that’s more important than making sure you get to know about</bq> <bq caption="Page 482">“Hey,” Holden said. “Do you know what Planck’s constant is?” “Six point six two six plus change times ten to the negative thirty-fourth meters squared kilos per second?” “Sure, why not,” Holden said, raising one finger. “But do you know why it’s that and not six point seven whatever the rest of it was?” Naomi shook her head. “Neither does anyone else. They still call it science. Most of what we know isn’t why things are what they are. We just figure out enough about how they work that we can predict the next thing that’s going to happen. That’s what you’ve got. Enough to predict. And if you think you’re right, then I do too. So let’s do this.” She shook her head, but not at him. “A massive n equals one study where our null hypothesis is that we all get killed.” “Not necessarily,” Holden said. “They only have fifteen to our one. We might still take them. We have Bobbie and Amos.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 495">Where the air began and the crash couch ended was lost. The boundary between his body and his environment blurred. He had known since he was too young to remember learning that atoms were made from more space than material, and that at the lowest levels, the things that made atoms could bounce in and out of being. He’d never seen it before. He’d never been so aware that he was a vapor of energy. A vibration in a guitar string that didn’t exist.</bq> <bq caption="Page 497">She wondered how long it would take to actually do something that mattered. And what would happen when they all ran out of time. She felt like she had a tiny Nico Sanjrani in the back of her head counting down the hours until the Belt—no, until all humanity—needed the farms and medical centers and mines and processing facilities that they hadn’t built because they’d been too busy fighting.</bq> <bq caption="Page 500">“I’m sorry.” What she meant was I’m sorry I didn’t stop the attack that killed your husband and I’m sorry I didn’t see Inaros for what he was sooner and I would do it all differently if I could live my life backward and try again. Avasarala paused, looked deeply into Michio’s eyes, and it was like seeing someone through a mask. The deepness there startled her. When she spoke, it was as if she’d heard every nuance. “Politics is the art of the possible, Captain Pa. When you play at our level, grudges cost lives.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 515">But as in astronomy the new view said: “It is true that we do not feel the movement of the earth, but by admitting its immobility we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting its motion (which we do not feel) we arrive at laws,” so also in history the new view says: “It is true that we are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our free will we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external world, on time, and on cause, we arrive at laws.” In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious.</bq> <bq caption="Page 518">She’d learned more about how to be with traumatized people in the last year than she’d ever hoped to know, and much of what she came to understand was that humans were domestic animals like dogs and cats. They responded poorly to threats and well to a gentle building of trust. Not rocket science, but easy to forget.</bq> <bq caption="Page 521">But it was also a mistake to lose sight of all the individual lives and choices and flashes of pure dumb luck that brought humanity as far as they’d come. History, she thought, was perhaps better considered as a great improvisation. A thinking-through of some immense, generations-long thought. Or daydream.</bq>