Dulcinea story
The series opens with Juliette Mao breaking out of a storage locker on an unidentified spaceship. Seemingly the only survivor, she breaks into the engineering room of the vessel to find its nuclear reactor fused with human remains. On the dwarf planet Ceres, Star Helix Detective Joe Miller is assigned to find Mao and return her to her rich parents on Luna. In New York, UN executive Chrisjen Avasarala interrogates a captured operative of the Outer Planets Alliance, a militant Belter group, about contraband stealth technology. On its way to Ceres, the ice hauler Canterbury receives a distress signal from the freighter Scopuli. The distress signal is erased from the Canterbury logs, presumed to be pirate bait, but acting Executive Officer Jim Holden secretly reports the signal to company headquarters, forcing the captain to send a rescue mission aboard the shuttle Knight. Holden, joined on the Knight by ship's engineer Naomi Nagata, mechanic Amos Burton, pilot Alex Kamal, and medic Shed Garvey, find the Scopuli empty and recover the distress signal transponder. As the shuttle heads back, a mysterious stealth ship destroys the ship Canterbury with nuclear torpedoes, leaving the Knight crew as the only survivors.
13 total · 5 major · 8 minor
| Theme | Level | Motivation |
|---|---|---|
| helping a stranger in need | major | There was much debate on the Canterbury on whether they should go out of their way to answer a potentially dangerous distress call. |
| law enforcement | major | In one storyline, Detective Miller was tasked with investigating the disappearance of the heiress Julie Mao. |
| prejudice against someone of a different social class | major | The Belters were akin to an uneducated, chronically malnourished underclass whose purpose was to sacrifice their health in order to send resources back to the inner circles of the solar system. Their bodies were frail due to living in low gravity, and there were incidents of them being bullied and even tortured. |
| social inequality | major | The story juxtaposes three factions that it is easy to imagine counterparts to in the real world's modern history. At the center is decadent and imperious Earth/Luna. Mars is an industrious and militaristic rising power working intensively to build a world for themselves. The beknighted Belters are a collection of exploited colonies in the far reaches of the solar system. In particular, the affluence of Earthers was compared and contrasted with the squalor of the Belters. |
| transnational conflict over a shared resource | major | The premise of the story is that at least three factions, Earth, Mars, and the Belters, vie for supremacy in order to control the precious resources, especially water, of the solar system. |
| acute anxiety | minor | The Executive Officer on the ice hauler Canterbury had a complete nervous breakdown, and had to be restrained and taken from his quarters. |
| coping with being tortured | minor | Heikki Sabong was being interrogated under torture about his alleged carrying of contraband stealth technology. |
| speculative stealth technology | minor | Earth suspected Mars of having developed politically stabilizing stealth technology. |
| stranded in outer space | minor | The story concluded with the Knight crew finding themselves stranded in a shuttle. |
| teenage rebellion | minor | Julie Mao had apparently had rejected her olgarchic father's dynastic plans for her. |