Nemesis Games recap

With the Rocinante laid up for months of repairs at Tycho, the crew separate for the first time in years. Alex goes home to Mars and, with the former marine Bobbie Draper, uncovers Martian officers selling warships to Belters. Amos returns to Baltimore to bury the woman who raised him. Naomi answers a message about the son she left behind and walks back into the life she fled, ending up a prisoner of Marco Inaros, the boy's father. Holden and Fred Johnson, chasing a kidnapped journalist, find that stealth technology has been stolen and that Tycho itself is compromised. All of it is one plan: Marco's Free Navy drops stealth-coated asteroids onto Earth, killing an unimaginable number of people and breaking the planet's climate, while a bought faction of the Martian navy defects with its ships. Naomi escapes across open vacuum onto a derelict rigged as a trap and survives long enough for Alex and Bobbie to reach her. Amos breaks Clarissa Mao out of a collapsing prison and crosses a ruined Earth to get off it. The crew reunite at Luna with Fred dead, the Belt in Marco's hands, and a war already lost to fight.

Previously: an alien artifact called the protomolecule was released on Eros Station as a corporate experiment, killing more than a million people, and the Ceres detective Miller rode the infected station into Venus to keep it from reaching Earth. James Holden and the crew of the Rocinante, engineer Naomi Nagata, mechanic Amos Burton and pilot Alex Kamal, exposed the people responsible, then broke a later programme that grew protomolecule-human hybrids from abducted children, with the help of the Martian marine Bobbie Draper and the UN official Chrisjen Avasarala. The protomolecule then left Venus and built an enormous ring beyond the orbit of Uranus. When the fleets went to look at it they were trapped inside its defences and thousands died before Holden reached the alien station at the centre; Clarissa Mao, the daughter of the industrialist behind the hybrid programme, tried to kill him there and was imprisoned for it. The ring proved to be one gate of more than thirteen hundred, each opening onto a habitable world. On the first of those worlds, Ilus, Holden mediated a small war between squatters and a chartered corporation while the planet itself woke up, and learned that the civilization that built the gates was destroyed by something that reached in from outside and switched it off. Since then, colony ships have poured through the gates by the thousand. The Belt, which built and crewed the ships that fed the inner planets, is watching its purpose and its people drain away, and the Outer Planets Alliance has no answer for it.

The Rocinante is laid up at Tycho Station for months of repairs after Ilus, and for the first time since they came together the crew go their separate ways. Holden stays on the station, at a loose end, helping Fred Johnson with Outer Planets Alliance business and watching the Belt's best people leave for the colony worlds. Alex flies to Mars to try to make peace with the ex-wife and the planet he abandoned, and finds Londres Nova half empty and the great Martian terraforming project quietly abandoned in everyone's minds. Amos goes to Earth for the first time since he was young, to settle the affairs of Lydia Maalouf, the woman who kept him alive as a child in Baltimore. Naomi receives a message she will not talk about, tells Holden only that it is personal and old, and takes a ship out to the Belt alone.

On Mars, Alex meets Bobbie Draper, out of the marines and out of purpose, who is tracing where surplus military equipment is going after a relative gets caught selling it. What they find is not petty theft: warships, munitions and whole cargoes are disappearing from Martian yards into Belter hands, with senior officers signing the paperwork. On Earth, Amos deals with Lydia's affairs and the people from his old life who want something from him. At Tycho, the journalist Monica Stuart comes to Holden with questions about missing ships and stolen stealth technology, and is then taken from her room and smuggled off the station in a shipping container; Holden and Fred get her back alive, and the recovery makes clear that whoever did it had help inside Tycho itself.

Naomi's errand takes her to the man she left fifteen years ago. Marco Inaros is a charismatic Belter radical with a following, and the son she bore him, Filip, has been raised on the story that his mother betrayed them. Long ago Marco used Naomi's engineering work to sabotage a ship and kill its crew, then made sure she could be blamed for it, and she gave up her son and disappeared rather than be used again. The message that drew her out was bait. She is taken aboard Marco's ship, and once there she is not a guest: she is leverage, an audience, and a way to hurt her son's opinion of her. Marco has been assembling something much larger than a faction, funded by the sale of Martian warships and hidden behind stolen stealth composites, and he is nearly ready to use it.

Marco's Free Navy launches its attack. Asteroids coated in the stolen stealth material, invisible to Earth's defences until it is far too late, are dropped onto the planet. Several get through. The impacts throw enough debris into the atmosphere to darken the sky worldwide, and the immediate casualties are only the beginning: the coming years of failed harvests and cold will kill on a scale nobody can count. Marco broadcasts a declaration of Belter independence over the wreckage, and Filip, who flew on the operation, is celebrated as its hero. Amos and Clarissa Mao are on Earth when the rocks come down, and the prison holding her is coming apart around them. Alex and Bobbie, still on Mars, understand at once where the ships they were tracking have gone and who bought them.

The system comes apart. A large part of the Martian navy defects with its ships, and Mars, already emptying, is left without the fleet that made it a power. The Free Navy moves on the Belt's stations, and Tycho is attacked from inside: the chief engineer Sakai has been Marco's agent throughout the refit, sabotaging the Rocinante and opening the station to a boarding party sent to take it. Holden and Fred fight them off and hold the ship, and Fred Johnson is killed doing it, leaving the Outer Planets Alliance without the one man who could speak for it. On Earth, Amos breaks Clarissa out of the failing prison and starts walking toward Baltimore through flooded, freezing, lawless country, because getting off the planet is the only survivable plan and there is only one person left who might arrange it.

Marco tires of keeping Naomi, and she sees what is coming. She escapes by going out an airlock without a suit and crossing open space to the Chetzemoka, her own old ship, holding her breath through the transit; Cyn, an old friend among Marco's crew, follows her out to stop her and dies. Aboard the Chetzemoka she finds the ship has been prepared as a trap: the reactor rigged, the comms replaced by a looping distress call in her own name, no working suit and very little air, the whole thing bait to draw the Rocinante into a mine field. Alone, half poisoned and unable to speak to anyone, she rewires what she can reach to send a hand-keyed signal that says the opposite of the recorded one, and then waits. Amos and Clarissa reach Erich in Baltimore, and Erich has a way off Earth.

Naomi's improvised signal is heard and correctly read, and Alex and Bobbie burn out to her in a fast racing pinnace while the Rocinante, sabotaged and short-crewed, cannot come itself. The rescue is a matter of minutes and centimetres: Naomi leaves the ship into vacuum a second time and Bobbie catches her in open space. Elsewhere the Free Navy consolidates, taking Medina Station and with it control of the ring gates and every route to the colony worlds, while the shattered inner planets try to work out what is left of their governments. Amos, Clarissa and Erich get off Earth and reach Luna. Avasarala, sidelined before the attack, is back in the middle of the wreckage and starts building an alliance out of whoever is still standing.

The crew reassemble at Luna aboard a repaired Rocinante, with Bobbie and Clarissa joining them. Naomi is alive but did not get Filip out; he chose his father, and Marco has him. The accounting is brutal: Earth is broken and will be dying for a generation, Fred Johnson is dead, the Outer Planets Alliance has splintered with most of its ships now flying Marco's flag, and Mars has lost a large part of its navy to defection. One Martian faction has gone further still, taking a protomolecule sample through a gate on business of its own that nobody understands yet. The Free Navy holds Medina Station and therefore the gates, controlling access to thirteen hundred worlds and the traffic of the entire system, and it is being cheered across the Belt as liberation. Avasarala assembles what is left of Earth, the remnants of Mars and the Belters who refuse Marco into a single alliance, and the Rocinante takes its place in it. The war has already been lost; what follows is the fight to take it back.

Naomi is recovered alive from the Chetzemoka and reunited with the crew, having failed to bring Filip out with her; he stays with his father, and Cyn dies in the airlock trying to stop her leaving. Alex and Bobbie bring the Razorback in for the rescue, and Amos, Clarissa and Erich get off a wrecked Earth to Luna, where what is left of the crew comes back together aboard the Rocinante. The cost is enormous. Earth has been struck by several stealth-coated asteroids, its climate is wrecked, and the death toll will run into the billions over the years that follow. Fred Johnson is dead, killed defending Tycho, and the Outer Planets Alliance he was building is broken into pieces, most of them now flying Marco Inaros's flag. A large part of the Martian navy has defected with its ships, and one faction has taken a protomolecule sample and vanished through one of the gates on its own business. Marco's Free Navy holds Medina Station and therefore the gates themselves, controlling access to thirteen hundred worlds and the trade of the whole system. Avasarala is back at the centre of what remains of Earth's government, building an alliance out of the survivors: Earth, the rump of Mars, and the Belters who refuse Marco. Bobbie and Clarissa join the Rocinante's crew. The war has been lost; the fight over how to answer it is only starting.