The messages coming back flooded the comm buffers with rage and sorrow, threats of vengeance and offers of aid. Those last were the hardest. New colonies still trying to force their way into local ecosystems so exotic that their bodies could hardly recognize them as life at all, isolated, exhausted, sometimes at the edge of their resources. And what they wanted was to send back help. He listened to their voices, saw the distress in their eyes. He couldn’t help, but love them a little bit.

Under the best conditions, disasters and plagues did that. It wasn’t universally true. There would always be hoarders and price gouging, people who closed their doors to refugees and left them freezing and starving. But the impulse to help was there too. To carry a burden together, even if it meant having less for yourself. Humanity had come as far as it had in a haze of war, sickness, violence, and genocide. History was drenched in blood. But it also had cooperation and kindness, generosity, intermarriage. The one didn’t come without the other.

Book 6 of the Expanse series continues the saga, with the Free Navy raise and Earth’s slow recovery following the meteorites’ strikes. While James Holden is again central to the story, he is but one of the dozen characters followed by the story. Some others include his crew; Avasarala, now Earth’s leader after the disaster; Fred Johnson, one of the main driving forces of the Outer Planets Alliance; and several leaders of the new Free Navy.

The story in the book is about the civil war between the this new force of Belters, which acquired advanced Mars military ships; the Mars’ demise and collapse of military, facing the opportunity of the new worlds discovered; allied with an Earth in tatters. Many are already seeing the dangerously degrading fragile balance of the continous war and disasters in our solar system.

The new worlds, dangerous and unknown, are the only way out to save the solar system from economic collapse. That is the end motivation for James Holden, and a new social equilibrium is pursued at the end of the book.

The aliens are not central to the story anymore and Detective Miller is a far memory, mentioned only once.

Overall, the book and the new developments follow nicely the story arc and prepare the ground for the next stage in the saga. A beautifully constructed story and series, now at the 6th iteration. Loved it.