“Brace,” Filip said, though there was no need. Everyone on the scaffold was already braced. In a thicker atmosphere, it would have been death for all of them. Here, it was little worse than a bad storm. Aaman grunted.

“Problem?” Filip asked.

“Pinché rock holed my foot,” Aaman said. “Hurts.”

Josie answered. “Gratia sa didn’t get your cock, coyo.”

“Not complaining,” Aaman said. “No complaints.”

The scaffold rockets exhausted themselves; the acceleration gravity dropped away. Below them, death had come to the shipyards. There were no lights now. Not even fires burning. Filip turned his gaze to the bright smear of stars, the galactic disk shining on them all. One of those lights wasn’t a star, but the exhaust plume of the Pella, coming to collect its wayward crew. Except Chuchu. Except Andrew. Filip wondered why he didn’t feel bad about the loss of two people under his command. His first command. His proof that he could handle a real mission, with real stakes, and come through clean.

He didn’t mean to speak. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe it was only a sigh that passed his lips. Miral chuckled.

“No shit, Filipito,” the older man said. And then, a moment later, “Feliz cumpleaños, sabez?”

Filip Inaros lifted his hands in thanks. It was his fifteenth birthday.

Chapter One: Holden

A year after the Callisto attacks, almost three years after he and his crew had headed out for Ilus, and about six days after they’d gotten back, James Holden floated next to his ship and watched a demolition mech cut her apart. Eight taut cables anchored the Rocinante to the walls of her berth. Only one of many in the Tycho Station repair dock, and the repair section was only one of many in the massive construction sphere. Around them in the kilometer-wide volume of the sphere a thousand other projects were going on, but Holden only had eyes for his ship.

The mech finished cutting and pulled off a large section of the outer hull. Beneath lay the skeleton of the ship, sturdy ribs surrounded by a tangled confusion of cabling and conduit, and under that, the second skin of the inner hull.

“Yeah,” Fred Johnson said, floating next to him, “you kind of fucked her up.”

Fred’s words, flattened and distorted by the comm system of their vacuum suits, were still a punch to the gut. That Fred, the nominal leader of the Outer Planets Alliance and one of the three most powerful people in the solar system, was taking a personal interest in his ship’s condition should have been reassuring. Instead, Holden felt like he had a father checking over his homework to make sure he hadn’t screwed anything up too badly.

“Interior mount’s bent,” a third voice said over the comm. A sour-faced man named Sakai, the new chief engineer at Tycho after the death of Samantha Rosenberg at what everyone was now calling the Slow Zone Incident. Sakai was monitoring the repairs from his office nearby through the mech’s suite of cameras and x-ray scanners.