He didn't so much fall on his sword as hand it over to Avasarala. He's smart enough to figure out that Mao was either playing both sides or at least had gone waaaaay out of control, and realises that it's not inconceivable he'll deliver Errinwright to Mars if it buys him more authority. By handing over the information …

No matter how good a system you have, people will always fall through the cracks.
(heck, someone might argue that the better the system, the harder it will be for it to bend enough to take care of the people who fall through the cracks)

Flowers feed of sunlight, but take a blowtorch to one of them and it really messes it up. Hence the idea to drop the whole thing into the Sun. The nuke-tipped missiles were Earth's idea to stop Eros, and they didn't know it was carrying an ET passenger with an "I got your physics laws right HERE" attitude. The only…

You mean at the negotiations? Peñano.

"Ιt's what we do". No wonder Praxideke was on the edge of freaking out.

Actually "decimate" as an indication of disastrous reduction is pretty close to the original. As I recall it was a disciplinary measure, when a large body of troops mutinied or failed, every tenth man would be executed. It persisted for many centuries, there's a story in a Dutch memoir of the Napoleonic wars where a…

Man, his body-horror aesthetic in anything with the protomolecule would be a thing to see.

I dunno, Alex seems to be able to navigate it just fine. Maybe by then, doing something like this comes as naturally as having multible tabs open in a computer comes to us?

Wow. Sharp eyes.

They're all using spaceships, dammit. Ships have helmsmen, what's with all the "pilot" crap everyone keeps throwing around?

Ι think the Interface is a POV shot. The curved object at the bottom is Cyllene, and the camera is pointed at Ganymede. Those weird black-and-white marks on the screen are a projection on Alex's screen of the surface of Cyllene, allowing him to track how he's backing into the big central crater- note how the triangle…

On your last point, people are probably cheaper than robots.

The lasagna were, I think, in place of the conversation you mention. Alex realises that Amos is damn hard to figure out, and volatile, and his thought process is hard to figure out, so instead of trying to sit down and talk it out- hey presto! a gesture that speaks louder than words.
But yes, there bit with the Somnambu…

The one objection I have to your excellent point above is that Avasarala could have achieved the same effect on the Martians without resorting to profanity- her cutting off the envoy's objections was already in the right mode for that.
Well, two objections (surprise and fear, and ruthless efficiency…). Draper had…

"It's not my first rodeo". Man, that got a chuckle out of me.

Also, noone has called Alex "helmsman". That really rankles.

If you try that, you'll have to go through Drummer first. Which…erm, might not turn out well for you.

Well, we are talking about the man who settled an argument by throwing an armed fellow twice his size out of an airlock…

Very, very good points. Thanks!

When coordinating with Amos, Holden says something about Naomi taking the CO2 "scrubbers" (that's what it sounded like, anyway) offline and later that Nitrogen levels are rising. Apparently, miners call the mixture of water vapour, CO2 and Nitrogen "blackdamp", and fear it because it can cause rapid asphyxiation. So…