Pa's loving chief engineer meets the crisis with drug-bright metaphysics while his captain decides to bargain with Fred Johnson.
Josep is Michio Pa's older husband and the Connaught's chief engineer, a tattooed practical worker whose trust in Pa has supported her break from Marco. While their ship tracks the divided fleets and the destruction of the Witch of Endor, he takes an intoxicant and turns Pa's isolation into a joyful theory of meaning: their disconnection, he insists, is the path by which a truer community will form.
Pa treats the cosmic language as beautiful nonsense but not as a reason to love him less. She straps him safely into a crash couch, asks Laura to keep an eye on him, and then pursues the harder sober conclusion: only a temporary agreement with Fred Johnson can create enough protected space for their supplies to reach people.
An older Belter man in a ship jumpsuit, covered in obsolete political and religious tattoos; under intoxication his dilated pupils make his warm eyes appear almost entirely black.
Josep is Pa's intimate counselor, whose faith in her does not spare her from making cold practical decisions.