Portraits revealed through your current reading position.
On Mars, Avasarala sees the true cost of New Terra: Holden made it a feel-good precedent for a thousand-world land rush that will kill Mars — so she recruits Bobbie Draper back onto the board.
Avasarala, UN power broker newly promoted (and hating the travel it forces), works Mars — charming the unreadable Speaker Pratkanis, trading candid realpolitik with Fred Johnson of the OPA, and grumbling about her figurehead secretary-general Gao. Over dinner with Bobbie Draper she lays bare the stakes hidden behind the 'right-to-gate-access' cover story: sixteen hundred ships are already bound for the Ring, and beyond it lie a thousand worlds with breathable, Earth-like atmospheres — the very kind the protomolecule's makers sought. Holden's Ilus was the precedent, and instead of the ugly cautionary clusterfuck she'd sent him to showcase (to 'put the brakes on' and save Mars), he made it a feel-good story: get to a world fast, squat hard, and keep it.
That, she explains, dooms Mars — with a thousand open skies, its people leave, terraforming stops, the tax base and state collapse, leaving only its vast navy (fifteen thousand warheads, battlecruisers, real proton cannons) as a resource to sell or wield: the seed of the first interstellar war. 'Mars is dead… Holden and this Havelock sonofabitch and Elvi Okoye killed it.' Tired and clear-eyed, she turns the dinner into what it truly is — a recruitment: 'I need to put you back on the board, soldier.'
An aging, formidable Earth-born woman in a sari, steel-gray hair; here in low Martian gravity that makes her skip 'like a schoolgirl' and look younger, tired behind sharp eyes and a foul tongue.
UN power broker; the strategist who reads New Terra as the trigger of a Mars-killing migration and moves to recruit Bobbie Draper for the coming conflict.
Also appears in books you've already read — spoiler-safe to their endings: