more leaves 20200624

Look at these new little branches and leaves.   

Leviathan 45 - The end of the book

ch 45 holden 453

Naomi and holden doing it.  Good for them, finding love in the Apocalypse.  They get a call from Fred.  They go to Fred's office.  Miller is there.  There are a couple ships heading to Eros.  So the plan to push Eros into the sun has to be done like now.  The hitch is Fred wants the sample of the alien goo that holden has.  Holden says no and tells Amos if anybody tries to take it, blow them up super good.  Fred is super pissed at this.  Miller's like You got no choice but to move forward and have faith in Holden.  They gotta go do this thing with the Mormon ship crashing into Eros and driving it into the sun super fast, so there's no more time to bicker about this.

ch 46 miller 462

Miller is waiting for the other shoe to drop from taking Holden's side in the whole safe with the sample in it argument cause he works for the OPA and Fred's his boss and he assigns the jobs and what not.  The shoe is that there's a bunch of Mormon's that have found out about the plan to crash the ship into Eros so as to push it into the sun and have stowed way on the ship kind of like protesters that chain themselves to trees so thehy won't get cut down.  It's Miller's job to go onto the ship and get them all off.  He and Fred talk and Fred says something about Holden and uses the word friends in the statement and Miller's response is something like "I don't have Friends, I have a lot of people I used to work with"  It's a little sad how true that is to my life.  Anyway, they're loading onto the ship that has all the nuclear mines they're gonna put on Eros so that even if the ship doesn't properly drive it into the sun, it'll make it so that no human can possibley step foot on Eros ever again.  The crew has been smoking some weed and everyone is giddy.  Why are they giddy?  Mars got the memo about Protogen being evel and what not and they blew up Pheobe.  Saturn's got one less moon.  Protogen has one less evil research facility.

ch 47 holden 472

I feel good about my use if the word boning because Amos uses it.  He seems to like that holden and Naomi are boning.  Alex doesn't seem to have a problem with it.  Holden has a talk with the earth corvette that's protecting the science vessel and while they don't say much, the ships stop moving, which is good enough for holden.  Naomi and holden talk more about miller killing Dresden.  Naomi is on Miller's side now.  Holden is leaning that way but he needs to wrap his mind around it a little bit more.  Naomi sees the earth ship sent out a distress signal.  Which earth ships are coming?  ALL OF THEM!!!1!!!

CH 48 miller 481

Miller is with the group attaching ships loaded with nukes to all the docks on Eros so they can blow when the Mormon ship hits Eros so even if it doesn't drive into the sun, no human can get inside.  He tells the crew he's staying on one of those ships.  No one tries to talk him out of it.  He watches as the Mormon  ship comes to blow him up.  I starts as a bright point in the sky and slowly becomes more visible.  He's all excited for it to collide with Eros and kill him.  It doesn't.  It flies past.  Did it miss on purpose?  Miller doesn't think such a thing is possible at that speed.  His conclusion is that somehow Eros dodged the incoming ship.

CH 49/holden 490

The situation with Eros has gone from bad to worse.  It didn't just move the one time.  It's still moving.  The only direction they can asertain at the moment is toward the sun.  And the worse has become even worser because now Eros isn't showing up on radar anymore.  So they're gonna have to keep in visual range of the station.  This is now so bad that Holden has decided to talk to the earth ship and make nice.  Mostly so the other earth ships that are heading toward Eros won't blow them up.  They agree to stick together and follow Eros as long as they can.  The problem is Eros is already going super fast and who knows how much faster it might get.  They call Fred to tell him what's going on and their best bad idea si tto tell Miller to blow up some of the mines to push the station some direction.    So that's the plan.  Call Miller.

ch 50 miller 499

Miller feels wierd because Eros is moving super fast and he doesn't feel it.  Holden calls Miller and tells him the idea of blowing mines to move Eros some direction.  Miller tells them he can't do that cause he's not on the ship that has thosecontrols.  He's on the station and is looking forward to being left to die.  So they're gonna have to call that ship to do the exploding.  Miller is wishing he believed in God because it would make this whole thing much less bothersome.  He's moving some mines.  His plan is to find whatever is controlling this thing, which he is assuming is in the middle somewhere, and blow it up.  That won't stop Eros from continuing to go whatever direction it's going, but at least then it's a rock headinga  direction rather than a rat scurying around whichever way it wants to go.  Miller's got all the nukes on a card nad with the help of the roci's crew has set up a deadman's switch to blow the nukes if he doesn't push a button every 5 seconds.  He tells holden to make sure that Juli's parents' a) don't get away with this and b) know he's sorry he didn't find her before things went bad.

ch 51 holden 507

things are bad.  Eros is still accelerating and the gforces of the ship have made it so they can't talk anymore, they're texting.  Holden is texting with Fred and the punchline is that Earth is going to launch all their nukes at Eros and they need the Roci to paint Eros with a laser sothe Nukes know what to blow up.  They should do this by setting the ship to autopiolit and probably die int eh process.  Taking a look at their sutation and realizing that they're pretty close to the Roci's top speed and Eros is still speeding up so he kills the engine.  The two earth ships follow suit.  We're all feeling a little hopeless and humanity apears doomed.  Until one of the earth ships turns on their transponder.  That gives HOlden the idea that maybe they can turn on the transponders on the ships still attached to Eros.  Naomi is able to make that happen.  But nothing can ever work out for them.  Miller calls to tell them there's a problem.

ch 52 miller 517

This chapter is basically a horror movie.  Miller is trying to make his way to whatever is in charge here so he can blow it up.  This is especially challenging because everywhere he goes horrible things like disembodied hands and wierd flying things and there's mutated plants and what not.  You could make a whole silent hill esque video game out of the basic idea of trying to get Miller through this horror show to blow up the station.  Also, Miller is having a hell of a time getting around having to push the button every 5 seconds.  So he rigs up a thing to have the bumb hold the button down while he opens doors and what not.  He does a lot of thinking while he is trying to find the gooey center of the station.  His horrifying realization is that the people on this station aren't dead, they're just mutated by the alien virus, but they're still thinking and controlling things with their human brains.  I don't get why this changes anything.  I think you still want to destroy Eros even with this information.  This is where Miller calls Holden to say they have a problem.

ch 53 holden 527

So miller's whole thing is that he doesn't just believe these people are still alive.  He thinks Julie is controlling everything.  He wants to find his way to Julie and see if he can talk to her and maybe get her to communicate to earth and talk them out of the whole blow up Eros with all their missiles plan.  They have 27 hours till the missiles get to Eros.  Miller would like some more time.  He doesn't know where Julie is and he's just walking around on foot.  Eros isn't that big, but trying to find a single person by foot might be more time consuming than you think.  Holden's thought is this, if you can find her and she's not willing to change her direction or speed, Miller's gotta use the bomb to blow her up.  Miller is amenable to this.  Mostly cause he's pretty confident that if he makes it to Julie he knows her so well that he'll be able to talk her into changing what she's doing.  The problem is how can you give him more time?  slow down the missiles?  Holden is thinking maybe he Naomi can do something where she makes some other ships somewhere else look like they're the ships the missiles are going after.  Naomi is like no thanks.  So Holden calls Fred to see if he can figure something out.  Holden says, if Fred can slow down the missiles to give Miller more time, he'll give him the safe with the sample of the protogen particle.  This pisses Fred off.  Holden pretty much pisses Fred off all the time now.  But Fred's willing to play ball.  So we'll see how it goes.

ch 54 miller 537

Miller is on his mission to find Julie.  It's rough.  He keeps running out of air and trying to find some close so he doesn't have to go back to any of the ships.  He's pretty successful in this.  He has lots of talks with a birage of imaginary friends.  In his talks with his imaginary friends he does a lot of thinking and comes up with a theory that he's looking for a place kinda like a well funded drug lab.  So it's gotta be a place that normal people wouldn't go.  He figures the backup environmental control area is a good place to try.  He makes his way there and holy crap he finds Julie.  She's physically not really Julie anymore.  She's kinda got a head and arms but her torso is kinda merged with the rest of the protomolecule goop.  He starts to talk to her and she kinda wakes up.  Her body is all gooped up but her arms and mind seem to function.  She's been in kinda a dream state and between her and the protomolecule they arrived on the goal of getting to earth.  But Miller tells her she can't do that.  She's gotta go to Venus instead.  He doesn't mention the bombs, but he gives her the tablet and has her keep the button down so they don't self destruct.  Then he takes his space suit off.  This seems like a bad idea, but he doesn't instantly die.  The air is bad, but it's breathable enough.  The protomolecule starts to attach itself to Miller.  Julie's really struggling with the idea of going to Venus cause the protomolecule wants to go to Earth where all the intelligent life is so it can consume it, like it consumed Julie.  But Julie seems to have control of the situation now and is amenable to heading to Venus rather than Earth.

ch 55 holden 547

Holden's having a dream about being back home and Naomi's there with him and it's nice until it turns into a nightmare and what used to be Eros starts coming crashing down to wipe out all life on earth.  He wakes up to the earth ship telling him to get ready to be boarded.  They've figured out that them and Fred have taken over the earth missiles and they are not at all pleased.  Holden isn't gonna comply.  They're evasive maneauvering to avoid the shooting at them that the earth ship is doing.  Then they can see Eros again.  It's stopped being invisible and it appears to be heading toward Venus.  I guess that's enough to get the earth ship to stop shooting at them.  But earth has still gotta be super pissed at them and Fred about them stealing their missiles.  I suppose there will be plot about that in the next book.  The rest of this chapter is just how Eros heads to Venus and people are thinking it might crash into Venus, but it doesn't, it settles into orbit.  Then it breaks apart into smaller and smaller pieces and those small pieces drift down to Venus's surface.  So the big mystery here is what's the protomolecule gonna do next.  Holden can't imagine it'll be cool with just hanging out on Venus.

epilogue Fred 555

Fred is on Ceres to give a speech about how we need peace and stuff.  Holden comes in and they talk about the Crystal spires that are building up on Venus and Miller.  The belter that gave his own life to save earth.  Holden's all righteous about it and he's like "People need to know the man" and says "he was a good man" and Fred's like "he wasn't, but he did his job."  They don't need to know about the man, they need a symbol to unite the solar system.  He starts his speech and that's the end of the book

Leviathan 34 - 44

CH 34 miller page 331

They explore the stealth ship.  It's gross.  This shouldn't surprise you, the reader, because they describe the grossness in the preamble, the last time we saw Julie alive.  They get power and stuff.  Lots of blah blah blah until they find a promotional video made by a company called protogen where they talk about this particle they found on pheobe, a moon of Saturn's.  We assume this particle is what turned people into vomit.zombies.  where it takes another turn is they declare that Phoebe isn't a natural moon.  It was a projectile launched from somewhere else in the galaxy toward earth to turn  everything on earth into vomit zombies.  So its an alien bioweapon.  But luckily it got caught by Saturn's gravity and life continued on earth without alien interference.  The punchline is that the war is just a distraction to allow them to run tests like they did on Eros.  Yeah science.

CH 35 holden 347
Naomi has been digging through the comm logs and not a lot of it is useful.  They were sending encoded beams to seemingly random spots.  The conclusion is they must have been sending those messages to a ship that was sending them to their true destination.  But the last message wasn't encoded and it said the crew was all dead or dying, a sample was in the safe and coordinates of the ship.  That didn't go to plan because Julie was able to move the ship.  They end up removing the previously mentioned safe by cutting a big part of the ship out and then Amos rigs one of the nukes on the stealth ship to blow it up.  Back on their Martian ship that's been outfitted to look like a belter ship Miller tells Holden the latest news from out in space.  All the Earth ships in orbit of Mars blew up all the Martian ships.  So that's bad.

Ch 36 miller 356
The war is bad, everyone is sad.  Earth blew up one of Mars' moons.  All of Mars' ships are heading back from the belt to do war against Earth real good. Everyone is still being polite and not destroying anything on a planet.  Miller and holden have a long talk while they get their blood flush and cancer treatment.  Holden really wants to broadcast everything to everyone.  Miller thinks it's a bad idea.  He asks "What would Naomi do" and holden asks miller if that's how he works and miller thinks about Julie and I think about how he used to think about his ex wife before Julie.  Miller's always thinking what would the lady in his life would do before he does something.  Even if that lady is his imaginary friend and it doesn't really help because he's just talking to himself.

6/6/2020: If you're not directly and firmly in support of black lives matter, you're probably racist.  That's why we're boycotting https://www.epbot.com/

ch 37 holden 366

They make their way back to Fred.  They make food and have some meaningless smalltalk.  They tell Fred everything but they don't give him the safe.  We don't have any sort of a plan at this point.  We just have information.

ch 38 miller 377

Miller gets a hold of his old earther partner who now works for Protogen.  He explains that Protogen's security was more like an army than it was a police force.  Miller asks if he knows anything about a secret Protogen Science facility.  His earther partner thinks he's found it.  He's pretty sure he'd be killed if anyone found out he sent this info to Miller, so Miller better cover his tracks on his side.  Miller tells Holden he wants to talk to Fred now that he's got the coordinates.  They have a meeting where Miller says a bunch of lowkey insulting things to Fred cause he needs to find someone that has the serious firepower to really take this station down.  This conversation takes an abrupt turn when Naomi explains that Fred is THE Fred Johnson, The butcher of Anderson Station.  Miller's all in now and wants to be on the ground crew invasion force.  The end of the chapter is Miller and Holden having a conversation about what to do if things go all wrong.  They might have come to some sort of conclusion, but I don't remember it.

ch 39 holden 386

They're doing their thing to attack the station.  They're doing this fun thing where the Roci is powered down and Fred's ship is broadcasting that it's a container that broke loose.  Once it's close enough the Roci is gonna come alive and do some shooting.  They do some scanning and they're pretty sure there's a stealth ship with the station.  The plan is to shoot the communications array on the station so it can't shoot very good and then fight the stealth ship.  There's a complication, it's two stealth ships.  You'd think Holden and crew would be screwed.  But they're the main characters so while there's a lot of damage, the plan pretty much works.

ch 40 miller 401

The assault on the station goes well.  Miller says some cool things in the midst of it.  When they've got things locked down, Fred shows up and says some cool stuff too.  Where we leave off is Dresden, the guy from the video talking about the vomit zombies as very valuable, offers to give them all sorts of money and what not if they leave so that protogen can get back to work and Fred says something super cool.

CH 41 Holden 411

This chapter is just Dresden talking.  He's very good at talking.  He makes some very convincing arguments as to the value inherent in his plan.  Things are looking up for Dresden.  He's got this cool speech about how Ghengis Khan killed A LOT of people for what he thought was the greater good and it all kinda fizled out when he died.  Dresden wants Humanity to spread and become a galactic empire.  We can't do that if we run into the aliens that sent this thing our way two billion years ago.  We have to use it to evolve ourselves so we can fight them.  Things take a bit of a turn when he confesses that he's had all the engineers on the station relieved of their ethical restraints.  And every now and then those ethics return and he has to kill some of them.

Ch 42 miller 421

You know how I said things took a bit of a turn with Dresden's speech?  Miller shot him in the face a couple times.  Then a couple times in the chest. Then a couple more times.  So, that's a wrap on Dresden.  Holden is displeased with this.  He tells Miller to find another ride home.  Other OOPA ships come to tear the station apart.  They're being real careful taking down the rest of the station staff on account of them being a bunch of psychos.  Miller's so much better at copping than the OPA guys are.  He found so many people with hidden stabbing implements.  There was a joke about psychopaths and funerals.  My aunt told me that joke once.  Miller is crashing with one of the kids that was on the station raid.  He's wearing out his welcome and should find a place of his own.  He finds another kid that was on that raid and shows him a terminal.  It's the feed from Eros.  It's really horrible.  Disembodied Arms moving around and what not.  Miller sees Naomi and Amos.  They are not happy to see him.  Even so he buys them a beer.  Naomi has a lame excuse and leaves.  Amos tells him in a direct manner that they ain't friends no more.  Miller is sad.

ch 43 holden 432

the ship is about 90% finished getting repaired.  The HBIC on the repair is named Sam.  Amos has been unsuccessfully in his attempts to wooooo her.  Naomi and Sam are fast friends.  They go to bars and win games together.  Holden likes taking showers.  Miller comes to talk to Holden.  He does some talking and Holden very kindly tells him he doesn't feel safe around him and if Miller could kindly fuck off forever that would be great.  Holden gets a little nostalgic thinking about how nice it was that Miller was an uncontionable killer when he was helping them get off of Eros and now he feels bad for cutting him out of his life.  He calls Naomi to talk about his feelings.  He ends up going to the bar.  They talk about Miller.  I'm not sure if they made any sort of decision about Miller.  So that's a bit of a bummer cause as a reader I'd like to know if we're gonna spend the rest of the book with the Miller and Holden chapters feeling like it doesn't matter who's chapter is who because they're together or if they're gonna start being independent story lines or not.  But that shortly doesn't matter cause Holden and Naomi are gonna bone.  Makes me think of that beautiful loving quote from Dumb and Dumber "The first time I set eyes on Mary Swanson, I just got that old fashioned romantic feeling where I'd do anything to bone her."

ch 44 miller 442

Miller is having a hard time of it on the station. He tries to get a security job.  It doesn't work out.  He's overqualified.  Also, he's low key famous for the raid on the Protogen station and it's working against him.  So he goes to beg Fred for a job.  Fred's a straight shooter and so it's a difficult conversation.  If earth comes after Dresden's killer, and it benefits Fred in the peace negotiations, Fred is gonna turn Miller over in a hot second.  But they have some hard conversations and Fred is amenable to bringing him on as an independent contractor.  They get to talking about what to do about the Eros situation.  Lots of different ideas.  The best one is to take the Mormon ship and use it to push Eros into the sun.  The Mormons are going to be pissed.

office view 6/12/2020

I clipped these branches just the other day and they are growing little leaves to good.  So I'm gonna take a picture every work day to track their growth.

Leviathan wakes ch 23 through 33

chapter 23 holden page 231
Holden and Naomi and Amos and Alex all make it to Eros safe and sound.  Holden doesn't like the casino level.  Amos does.  Amos sees they have a tail, it's Miller.  WORLDS ARE COLLIDING!!!  They get to the hotel where Lionel is staying.  Just one lady in the waiting room.  They decide to surprise Lionel.  Before they can do so the lady in the lobby pulls a gun on them.  Before anything comes of that, a bunch of other people with bigger guns bust in and start shooting.  Things don't look good for the former crew of the Canturbury.  Miller comes in and shoots a bunch of people.  The day appears to have been saved


chapter 24 miller page 238
Juliette Andromeda Mao is dead.  Nothing else matters.

Chapter 25 holden page 248
they have Julie's phone and they hack into it with the name of her racing ship back home.  They find a file named notebook.  They read that file and it has Julie's story from the time she found her captain's head loosely connected to the pile of goo that used to be his body.  The short story is that it's some sort of infectious disease and she died from it.  She thinks it was created in the martian research space station that got blown up.  There's a long string of digits they recognize as an asteroid identifier.  They're gonna go to that asteroid.

Chapter 26 miller page 258
There's an alarm and everyone is told to go to the casino.  Miller recongizes one of the security guys as a thug he arested in ceres once.  Also he recognizes the riot geer as the gear stolen from Ceres.  There's a bunch of thugs walking around in stolen riot gear on Eros and they're the one's in charge when alarm buzzers are going off.  This seems bad, so the crew is gonna try to make their way back to the ship.

chapter 27 holden page 267
miller explains things to holden.  They hide in a maintenance shed.  Miller and holden tellt he crew to sit tight while they try to figure out how to get to the ship.  Instead, what they find is a room full of dead bodies.  Their best guess is radiation, which means they have radiation poisoning and now they're totally hosed.

chapter 28 miller page 277
Shenhannegans aside this chapter is holden and miller trying to make their way back to the maintenance shed with the rest of the crew.  This situation is bad and everyone that they talk to about it reveals it to be a little bit worse.  The thugs in riot gear are killing anyone that won't peaceful make their way to the casino. But Miller is better at killing than them so they make it back to the shed without being dead.  Worse than that, they make their way to the maintenance shed and the crew isn't there.

chapter 29 holden page 287
They decide to make their way for the ship cause the medical stuff there should be able to save their lives.  Worse case scenario it's not there and they're dead, but at least they know the crew got out.  They end up in the casino.  The thugs aren't actively killing people at random anymore.  Instead, they're blocking the exits and anyone that tries to leave is being killed.  So Miller and Holden decide to not leave so as to not get killed.

chapter 30 miller page 293
Things get real interesting when sirens start going off and the doors of the casino start opening up.  It's not aliens.  It's zombies.  And they're vomitting brown stuff on people.  The "guards" start shooting them like crazy.  Eventually they carve a hole through them and leave.  Miller and holden follow them.

chapter 31 holden page 302
This following thing works for a while.  Until the group they're following runs into another group of "guards" and they start arguing.  The arguing escalates to shooting.  Miller and holden decide to hang tight and wait for shooting to stop so as to not get shot themselves.  A group of guards come by and holden decides shooting them is the way to go.  The other part of holden's plan is to put on their uniforms and make a run for it.  This kinda works in that they get shot while running but are able to make it to the ship.  And the ship is still there.  And Amos is there and gives Holden the constructive criticism that he looks like shit.

6/1/2020: if you say all lives matter, you are racist.

chapter 32 miller page 311

Miller is all confused.  His memories are coming back to him slowly.  Like when you're having a dream where you're doing something important and you're stressed that it's not getting done.  But you're awake now and once you take a second to look at the real world, it all fades away.  Holden tells Naomi he loves her.  She says he don't.  Eros isn't responding.  The assumption is everyone is dead.  Miller tells Holden its OK to not be OK after killing someone.

Chapter 33 holden page 321

Holden makes his way to the bridge despite being in really bad shape.  Fred sends them a message.  They have the data from the donager.  That data shows that it was ships built on earth that blew up the donager.  Holden, being the mongrel idiot he is sends that data out to the entire solar system.  Miller, who walked up the stairs cause he didn't know there was a lift, explains to Holden why that was a bad idea.  Jump cut to the asteroid they found out about in Julie's room.  Jesus, that feels like it was FOR EVER ago.  There's a stealth ship.  They're pretty sure it's the ship that blew up the cant.