A grizzled former detective from The Belt pairs up with an idealistic ice mining spaceship captain from Earth to try to get to the bottom of a plot to pit the planets against each other and rule the stars! Can they do it?
This book by James S.A. Corey was so much fun!
I listened to the audiobook, which is a mere 21 hours long, but almost all the chapters are only about 20-30 minutes, so it was pretty easy to listen to a chapter while cooking. Listen to a chapter while washing dishes. Listen to a chapter while getting ready for bed, etc. It turned out to be pretty easy to finish it before it went back to the library.
Captain James Holden is the XO of a spaceship that mines ice from the rings of Saturn and delivers them to the spaceships of the Belt, where water is used only when absolutely necessary and reused as much as possible, thanks to life on a spaceship not producing any water, but still needing water to sustain life.
His ship gets a distress signal from another ship, but when they get there, scans of the ship show no signs of life, and a giant hole has been blown in one side of the ship’s hull.
Nevertheless, Holden and a few of his crewmates head out to investigate and make sure there’s no one left alive who’s stranded on the ship.
They don’t find anyone or anything, but while they’re out there, someone fires on their ship, vaporizing the entire rest of their crew. Holden and the three people with him are now the only ones from their crew left alive.
As soon as they realize their ship was vaporized by Martian technology, Holden puts out a transmission for all to hear that a Belter ship was attacked by Mars.
To be clear, that’s not exactly what he said. He just noted that Martian technology was involved. But of course everyone takes that to mean he’s accusing Mars of attacking the Belt, causing interplanetary tensions to rise.
That’s when they get contacted by the Outer Planet revolutionaries.
Detective Miller was born and raised on the Belt. Thought he would be a cop on the Belt all his life before he got fired for doing his job a little too well.
He’s divorced and has been drinking a little too heavily ever since, making it easy to let him go.
But he also dives deeper than he’s been told he should into the case of a missing girl his boss doesn’t really want investigated. She just wants to create the appearance of investigating the case.
The girl, Julie, was in her early twenties and from a wealthy and influential family on the moon. She liked sailing, had been attacked at some point (it’s not clear exactly what kind of attack) and had responded by taking up martial arts so she never again has to feel like a victim.
Somewhere along the way, Julie had joined the Outer Planet (OP). Shortly before she disappeared, her parents had urged her to come home, saying her location wasn’t going to be safe for much longer.
When Detective Miller finds this note from Julie’s father around the same time tensions between the Belt, Mars, and Earth are escalating, he has to wonder how her father knew things were about to get dangerous…
Even after he gets fired, Miller can’t stop himself from investigating Julie’s disappearance. And hoping he’ll find her alive.
It doesn’t take too long before Miller’s investigation into Julie’s disappearance and Holden’s investigation into why, exactly, his entire crew was murdered, cross paths.
They’re a very unlikely duo for a lot of reasons, but mostly because Miller is pretty casual about killing people who get in his way and Holden has a pretty big problem with that. That’s the main tension between the two characters, or at least the way in which the tension between them is expressed. It’s what leads to the final breakdown of their friendship, although they do sort of reconnect after a while.
SPOILER ALERT
Julie is dead.
I was not surprised to find this out based on the book’s prologue. If anything, I was surprised to find out she lived as long as she did.
But Miller is predictably upset at the news, having developed an idea of Julie in his mind that he’s way too attached to. Then again, given the lack of meaningful relationships in his life, I guess it shouldn’t be surprising he latched onto this young girl who’s tough and uncompromising.
It turns out some scientists stumbled across some alien technology that’s supposed to jumpstart human evolution. The problem is the aliens are no longer around to explain how the technology works, and no one is even sure it does work. They just know that, if they can get it to work, they will have all the leverage they need to rule pretty much the entire galaxy.
If they can get it to work.
They test it by infecting people with it, then giving them radiation poisoning to activate it.
So far, it hasn’t worked as planned. The scientists killed an entire space station’s worth of people — millions — without getting the desired result, and without caring how many people they killed. They justify it by thinking about the number of people who they claim will ultimately be saved once they figure out how this thing works.
Unfortunately, Julie is Patient 0 on the space station. She was kidnapped and infected by the scientists to see what would happen. She knew what was happening to her and tried to quarantine herself, but the thing is way too contagious for that. Once it gets in the air, it’s all over.
Holden and Miller are barely able to make it off the space station without getting infected. They do get a hefty dose of radiation they’ll have to monitor and treat for the rest of their lives to avoid dying, but just making it out alive is a win.
They manage to get hold of one of the scientists involved in the whole mess and Miller kills him because Miller can clearly see how this guy is going to get away with it. Holden is upset because he believes everyone deserves a fair trial.
So that leads to the rift between Holden and Miller that ends their relationship. Now they just have to figure out what to do with the giant contaminated space station.
The plan is to light it up like the 4th of July, but before they can manage that, the space station starts moving. Really fast.
Turns out it’s on a collision course with Earth.
Fortunately for everyone on Earth, Miller had opted to go back to the space station, then stay on it as part of his suicide mission to destroy the thing so no one else can get infected. If the thing gets to Earth, it will infect everyone there and wipe out the entire planet.
That, in turn, will wipe out most of humanity because, while they have figured out how to make space ships and space stations mostly self sustaining, there are still some supplies they can only get from Earth.
Miller figures out that, although Julie’s body is completely wrecked, some form of her consciousness still exists, and it’s controlling the space station. She’s not trying to infect Earth, she’s trying to go home … to the moon.
Miller manages to convince her to head to Venus instead because there are no humans there. The last we hear about the space station, it is, in fact, on course to Venus.
I know this book is just the first in a long series, but this book worked pretty well as a standalone. As much as I enjoyed it, part of me is tempted to just leave it here. Maybe I’ll come back to it after all those other series I’ve been meaning to finish…