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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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.