Irradiated Rocinante captain who escapes the Eros death-experiment, leaves a traitor behind, and gets a fix on the enemy.
James Holden, captain of the gunship Rocinante, is trapped on Eros when the station's "radiation emergency" is revealed as a monstrous mass experiment: the entire population, a hundred thousand people, deliberately exposed to the protomolecule — the living weapon his crew found aboard the Anubis and that killed Julie Mao — to be watched like "bugs in a dish" while war is engineered as cover. Dosed with lethal radiation himself, Holden leads his crew, Miller, and a clutch of survivors through the OPA's old mech-shaft smuggling routes toward the docks, scavenging painkillers and stims to buy a few hours against the sickness, witnessing the horror of infected people spreading the substance and racing to outrun their own poisoning.
The ordeal hardens him. When the spy Kenzo — who betrayed his location to the assassins — begs for help and pleads that Holden is "a good man" who believes in mercy, Holden walks him into a contaminated area and leaves him to die infected: "we're better off," he tells the crew, no longer the man who refused all bloodshed. He reaches the Rocinante, where Naomi has held the ship for him against Alex's and the others' protests, and they blast free of the sealed, quarantined station. As they escape, Holden's crew traces the experiment's data uplink to its masters at a station called Thoth — "a fix on the bad guys." Mourning the few they saved and the many they couldn't, Holden vows: "we will."
Showing the early effects of acute radiation sickness.
Captain of the Rocinante, who survives the Eros protomolecule experiment, abandons the traitor Kenzo, and turns toward the conspirators at Thoth station.