Story so far

Two hundred years into humanity's spread across the solar system, the asteroid Belt is a colonized frontier where Earth and Mars hold the power and the Belters who mine the rocks and haul the ice do the suffering. On Ceres Station, resentment simmers into open agitation by the Outer Planets Alliance, and it is here that Detective Miller, a jaded cop who has spent so long in low gravity he no longer belongs to the Earth he came from, is handed a quiet, off-the-books assignment by his captain: find a runaway heiress named Juliette Andromeda Mao. The daughter of the powerful Mao-Kwikowski shipping family, Julie had thrown in with a radical student group and vanished, and her wealthy father wants her tracked down, detained, and shipped home. Miller takes the kidnap job with a shrug and begins pulling at threads.

Far out beyond the shipping lanes, the aging ice-freighter Canterbury picks up a distress signal from a derelict called the Scopuli. Reluctantly obligated to answer, the ship diverts, and Holden — freshly and unwillingly promoted to acting executive officer — leads a small shuttle team aboard the wreck. They find the Scopuli abandoned, its crew gone, its reactor deliberately shut down, and its hull holed by a breaching charge rather than a torpedo. The distress beacon, it turns out, was planted deliberately. The whole thing is bait.

As the shuttle crew realizes the trap, an unknown warship materializes out of nowhere, hidden by stealth technology no ordinary pirate could possess. It ignores Holden's stranded team and instead fires on the Canterbury. Holden's captain, his lover Ade, and the entire crew are gone in an instant — the ship destroyed by nuclear fire. The survivors, drifting in a leaky shuttle, are left staring at the impossible: only Mars is supposed to have stealth like that.