Nemesis Games

Book five is where a long series usually sags. The setup is spent, the endgame is not in sight, and the author pads the middle with a lesser adventure. The Expanse does the opposite. Nemesis Games takes the four characters we have been traveling with for four volumes and separates all of them, then watches the solar system catch fire while they are apart. It is the book where James S.A. Corey, the pen name of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, stops writing about a crew solving problems and starts writing about four people with four sets of problems and no way to call each other.

I came to it after Cibola Burn, which I liked less than the first three, and the shift in this one hit me like a change in air pressure. For the first time in the series, every chapter is told from inside one of the four main characters' heads: Holden, Naomi, Alex, and Amos, each on their own errand in a different part of the system, each carrying a piece of a plot that the reader can see assembling and none of them can. The book was published by Orbit in 2015, runs about 544 pages, and it adapted into the show's fifth season, which tells you the producers understood exactly what they had: the story where the family at the center of the series gets a stress test it barely survives.

The crew scatters

The Rocinante limps into Tycho Station with a broken drive and a repair estimate of six months, which means for the first time since the series began, the crew has nothing to do but be people. The ship is the home, and a home in drydock is just a strange hotel, so they scatter almost immediately.

Alex heads to Mars to make peace with his ex-wife Talissa, whose message he answered too late by a decade and change. Amos goes to Earth because the woman who raised him when he was a boy in Baltimore, Lydia Allen, has died, and his absence from her funeral is not something he is willing to accept. And Naomi answers a message from the Outer Planets Alliance network with no sender listed, which she knows is either a trap or a family emergency, and in her case those are the same thing.

Holden stays behind. It is the first time in years the man has been alone, and the book uses the solitude exactly right: he is the least interesting character in the series when he has no one to protect, and Corey knows it, so Holden's solo chapters become about the weirdness of a man in an empty house who has spent years in a crowded one. He gets one genuine plot of his own, involving the journalist Monica Stuart and footage of a freighter named the Rabia Balkhi, one of thirteen ships that vanished after transiting the ring gates, a slow-burn mystery that the series has been building for volumes.

Naomi, and the past that wants her back

The message comes from Ceres, and it is not from an OPA handler. It is from her son. Filip Inaros, fifteen years old, whom she last saw as an infant, is in trouble, or says he is. Naomi tells Holden she has to go alone, and when he objects, she gives him the ultimatum the marriage has been avoiding for four books: let her go, or they break up.

The Naomi chapters on Ceres are the best writing in the novel. She reunites with Cyn, an old friend from her Belter days, who steers her toward Filip. And through the reunion we finally get the full story of Marco Inaros, the man she left, the father of her son. Marco is a Belter revolutionary on the far side of violent, and the reason Naomi left him is the reason she never talks about him. She once wrote a program, a piece of code, and Marco used it to sabotage the reactor of a ship called the Augustin Gamarra, killing 234 people, an act he called the opening strike of a war. Naomi's code was the weapon. Marco refused to tell her what he had done until it was done, and when she tried to kill herself, he told her to leave and never look for him or Filip again, which she did, because it was the only exit he offered.

Filip's message was bait. Marco wants the Rocinante, and Filip, who worships his father the way children of difficult men sometimes do, helps set the trap. Naomi, suspicious at every step and unable to see the final move until it is made, buys a ship called the Chetzemoka through a shell company and takes it toward the rendezvous. When the moment comes, she tells Filip the ship is his. Then Cyn holds her and a man named Karal sedates her, and she wakes up a prisoner aboard Marco's ship, the Pella, at the Hungaria asteroid cluster.

Amos goes home

Amos arrives on Earth for a funeral and gets arrested at the port, because his history with Avasarala's security people is complicated enough that a large bald man with his record is not waved through. Chrisjen Avasarala, the UN's most dangerous civil servant, interviews him remotely, mostly to determine whether he is one of Holden's schemes in human form, then releases him when it becomes clear he is telling the truth.

What follows is the most intimate sequence in the series so far. Amos visits Lydia's widower, Charles Jacob Allen, in Philadelphia, does what he can for a man who is drowning, and then goes to Baltimore and calls in the only favors he has left. The favors belong to Erich, a gangster who knew Amos back when he was called Timothy, back before the man became a mechanic on a spaceship and a killer with a conscience. Erich is comfortable, careful, and not sentimental, and he takes Amos in anyway. Meanwhile Amos asks Avasarala for a strange favor: to visit Clarissa Mao in prison, the woman who tried to murder his captain and whom Amos has decided, in his own unembarrassed way, to care about.

Amos is the character the books have always handled best, because his morality is simple in a way that makes other people uncomfortable: he protects his people, and everything else is negotiable. In Nemesis Games, home stops being a place he escaped and starts being a place he understands. His chapters read like a crime novella inserted into a space opera, and for my money they are the most rereadable in the book.

Alex and Bobbie, hunting a ghost on Mars

Alex's peace mission to Mars goes badly in the normal ways and then very badly in abnormal ones. Talissa has a life, and his guilt is too late to matter to it. But he reconnects with Bobbie Draper, the former Martian marine, who is now working a dangerous freelance investigation: military equipment is leaving Mars on the black market with high-level navy help, and the people moving it do not like being asked questions. When intruders break into Bobbie's house and the two of them barely fight their way out, with Alex stabbed and Bobbie shot, it stops being an investigation and becomes a warning.

Bobbie also introduces Alex to the Razorback, the racing ship Julie Mao left behind, which becomes the vehicle of the book's most thrilling sequence. The two of them take it toward a rendezvous near the Hungaria cluster, where Martian corvette-class warships running dark open fire on them with targeting lasers and missiles. What follows is a run at ten g, then fifteen, toward Luna, with Alex's injuries ripping open under the acceleration, the drive core jettisoned into one missile and point defense cannons handling the other, and both of them waking up in a hospital having survived because Martin ships were shooting at them, which raises a question nobody in the solar system has answered yet: why is the Martian navy shooting at its own people?

The rocks fall

The answer arrives with a rock. Asteroids hidden behind stealth coating, the same coating stolen on Callisto in the prologue, impact the Earth at multiple points, the first one confirmed in North Africa. The bombardment is the largest event in the series so far, and the book stages it from the ground: Amos is in a prison waiting room on Earth to see Clarissa when the news breaks; the facility locks down; the sky fills with dust; people die in the hundreds of millions in the following weeks. Mars and the Belt watch, and the political map of the series rearranges itself in an afternoon.

Meanwhile the Free Navy, Marco's faction, hits Tycho Station. Three attackers storm Fred Johnson's office; Fred survives, barely, fighting alongside Holden. The station's defenses are disabled, torpedoes strike the Rocinante and crack its drive cone, and a second torpedo with a salvage rig steals the protomolecule sample from Fred's office. The one thing the good guys have guarded for five books is gone, and Fred, Drummer, and Holden spend the rest of the book dealing with the institutional wreckage.

The long way home

Amos's escape from Earth is the book's most grounded adventure. He, Clarissa Mao, who will be known to the crew as Peaches, and a monstrously strong fellow prisoner named Konecheck crawl up an elevator shaft to a surface where the sky is dark with debris. Konecheck, precisely as stable as he looks, tries to kill them and nearly succeeds before Clarissa shoots him and Amos kicks the body down the shaft. From there, Amos and Clarissa bicycle to Baltimore, because the trains are dead and Amos is not leaving anyone behind. Erich reappears, and after some negotiation the group steals a shuttle named the Zhang Guo from a private pad at Lake Winnipesaukee, fights off a squatter tribe guarding it, and slips past the Luna patrol by name-dropping Avasarala. It is a heist sequence inside a catastrophe, and it tells you everything about how the series treats competence: as the only thing that ever saves anyone.

The conspiracy also comes into focus aboard the Rocinante. The sabotage of the reactor driver, discovered after a station engineer named Sakai turns out to have used Naomi's old code to booby-trap the ship, would have destroyed Tycho when the drive hit ninety-five percent. Holden swaps out the driver at sixty percent, hands shaking, while Paula Gutierrez of Tycho security unravels the confession. And Marco, who has Naomi prisoner, plays a faked distress call in her voice to lure Holden into a trap, which Naomi hears from her cell and cannot stop. She palms an emergency decompression kit, because she is a Belter, and Belter children learn what to do when the air dies before they learn algebra.

Naomi in the dark

Naomi's escape from the Pella is the sequence the entire novel is built toward. She makes it to an airlock without an EVA suit, which is to say she makes it to a place where she can kill everyone in the compartment by opening a door. Cyn, her oldest friend, is there, begging her not to, believing she means to space herself. She blows the airlock anyway, killing him and everyone else in the lock, and rides the decompression to the Chetzemoka, the ship she bought with her own money, which is a trap: stripped of parts, locked down, broadcasting a fake distress call, and rigged to explode if anyone docks with it.

Alex and Bobbie arrive in the Razorback to rescue her and find a spinning coffin instead of a ship. With no working comms, Naomi exits in a suit with five minutes of air and uses Belter hand signals to warn them off. And then Bobbie Draper, in power armor, rides one of the Razorback's missiles across the gap, using her magnetic boots as a surfboard, and pulls Naomi off the wreck before it detonates. It is a ridiculous, magnificent piece of action writing, and it works because the books have spent four volumes establishing exactly what each of these people will spend to save the others.

Aftermath, and the shape of what comes next

On Luna, with Naomi in a med bay recovering from vacuum exposure, the pieces get moved into position for the next book. Avasarala, now the interim Secretary-General of the UN, announces a joint UN, Mars, and OPA task force to hunt the Free Navy, which is typically elegant, because she is arranging for her enemies to fight her other enemies. Naomi trades complete intelligence on Marco, everything, in exchange for immunity for herself and the crew for acts unrelated to the attack, and she testifies knowing it spells the end of her marriage in every way but the paperwork, because Holden will not forgive the lies, or maybe he will, which is a different and worse problem.

The last chapter, though, belongs to the deep background. The Free Navy holds Medina Station, the gateway to the ring network. Admiral Duarte, of the Martian navy, has taken the remaining Martian warships, and is supposedly Marco's ally, though the tactical picture suggests otherwise. And in the epilogue, aboard a ship called the Barkeith, we follow a captain through the Laconia gate, where something happens that has nothing to do with the Free Navy at all. Duarte has the stolen protomolecule sample, and something much bigger besides.

Why this is the hinge book

Gizmodo called Nemesis Games Corey's Empire Strikes Back, and the comparison is exact: the family is split, the empire strikes, the heroes lose ground, and the story descends into an underworld of consequences, with a cliffhanger that sets up Babylon's Ashes. Reviews at the time noted the structure as the series' most ambitious, and the book was nominated for the Goodreads Choice Award for science fiction. The standard criticism is the standard one for a middle chapter: it ends on several threads and resolves fewer, and a reader who arrived at book five by accident will be hopelessly lost. This is not a starting point. Start with Leviathan Wakes.

But for people who have been riding along, this is the volume where the series stops being a sequence of mysteries and becomes a story about the political cost of the future. The protomolecule gates were supposed to be the open door for humanity. Instead, they opened a door for the people who already knew how to use a catastrophe, and the book ends with the Free Navy in control of the door, a betrayer in control of the fleet, and an alien presence in the dark beyond the gate that made the entire war look like a family argument. It is the moment the series widens its scope from epic to enormous, and I closed it ready to start the next one, which is the highest review a book five can receive.