OPA boss who reveals the buried grief behind his cause and his deep entanglement in the Julie Mao conspiracy.
Anderson Dawes is the OPA's power on Ceres, a calm visionary pursuing "a Ceres for Belters, run by Belters" and, ultimately, Belter independence with himself, he hints, as governor. This episode lays bare both his depths and his guilt. He has Captain Shaddid in his pocket — he has, in effect, bought a police force — and he is revealed as central to the conspiracy: he provided the Scopuli crew, and it was Dawes to whom Julie Mao gave the world-changing device she'd bought from a data broker, the broker who then turned up dead before ships began exploding.
Confronted by Miller over Julie's fate, Dawes refuses to say whether she lives but opens his oldest wound: his sister Athena, the most beautiful child in the Belt, born with bones like chalk from a lifetime in zero-G, whom he could not afford to keep alive and laid to rest with his own hands in a bauxite tunnel they'd discovered together — crying, he says, until his tears turned to blood. From that grief grew his sense of millions of brothers and sisters across the Belt, a family he counts even Miller and the Earther Julie among. Yet he scorns Miller as a "welwala," a traitor who preys on his own, insisting Julie would despise him. His invocation of the hail of stones that will one day fall through the Inners' precious blue skies frames him as a man whose tenderness and ruthlessness spring from the same root. [uncertain: a tense confrontation with Miller closes on "die as you lived," leaving the immediate outcome between them unclear.]
The OPA's leading figure on Ceres, central to the Scopuli and Julie Mao conspiracy, who owns Captain Shaddid and dreams of Belter independence.