Cibola Burn characters

Appears from the start

A welder and construction worker among the refugees who fled the collapse of Ganymede and settled illegally on the first world reached through the gates. He lost a son to the hybrid program on Ganymede, and he has decided that no one will take anything else from his family. Anxious rather than fierce by nature, he is talked into helping with an act of sabotage he does not entirely believe in.

Appears from the start

Basia's wife and the settlement's doctor, practical, tough and better at hard decisions than her husband, treating a community that has no hospital, no supplies and no legal right to be where it is.

Appears from the start

Basia and Lucia's teenage daughter, who has a place waiting at a university back in the solar system and a berth on the ore ship in orbit to get her there.

Appears from the start

A settler on the new world, forceful, impatient with negotiation, and certain that the only answer to a corporation arriving with a charter is to make landing there impossible. He organizes the strike against the incoming company shuttle.

First appears in chapter 2

A biologist with the Royal Charter Energy science team, sent to catalogue the biosphere of the first alien world humanity has been able to walk on. Enthusiastic, rigorous and socially awkward, she is far more comfortable with an unfamiliar organism than with the politics of the expedition she has joined.

First appears in chapter 3

A security officer aboard the company ship Edward Israel, an Earther who once walked a beat on Ceres Station with a partner named Miller and has spent the years since as corporate muscle. Competent, self-aware about his own compromises, and uneasy about where his employer's orders are heading.

Also known as Jim Holden

First appears in chapter 4

Captain of the Rocinante, sent by the United Nations as a neutral mediator between the squatters and the chartered company, a job he is entirely unqualified for and accepts because the alternative is a war. He is also carrying a passenger nobody else can see, and the alien ruins on the planet are the reason he was really sent.

First appears in chapter 4

The Rocinante's executive officer and engineer, and Holden's partner. A Belter who has never lived at the bottom of a gravity well, she is more use in orbit than on the ground and knows exactly what a planet's pull would do to her.

First appears in chapter 4

The Rocinante's mechanic, who comes down to the surface with Holden and is entirely unbothered by being outnumbered by armed corporate security.

First appears in chapter 4

The Rocinante's pilot, holding the ship in orbit above a world nobody has charted, in the middle of a standoff between two groups who both want him to take a side.

First appears in chapter 4

A senior figure in the United Nations government on Earth, foul-mouthed and formidable, who arranges for Holden to be sent to the disputed world because he is the one person both sides might tolerate and because she wants the alien ruins looked at.

Also known as Miller

First appears in chapter 4

An apparition of the dead detective Josephus Miller, an artifact of the protomolecule wearing a familiar face, visible only to Holden. It has a purpose on this planet that it explains badly and in pieces, and it is not interested in the human argument going on around it.

First appears in chapter 5

Chief of security for Royal Charter Energy, a calm, courteous man with a soldier's record and an absolute conviction that the company's charter is the only law on the planet and that the settlers there are criminals. He responds to the attack on the landing site with lethal force and does not consider it a matter for debate.

First appears in chapter 5

The elected head of the settlers' governing council, who is trying to hold a frightened community together and would rather negotiate with the company than fight it.

First appears in chapter 6

A geologist on the company science team, dry, teasing and steadier than he looks, and Elvi's closest colleague on an expedition where the science keeps being interrupted by gunfire.