The Terran Federation has made its position clear: the miners are terrorists, the belt is in a state of emergency, and the blockade is legal under Article 9 of the Colonial Commerce Act. Cade’s crew released partial data and burned Hygeia for it. Two hundred dead, and Earth barely flinched.
The complete evidence — the financial records, the Senate payments, fourteen years of deliberately falsified safety reports — is still out there. So is Dieter Thiel, TEC’s security director, with a fleet and authorization to use it. The only people left willing to fight are the ones who’ve already lost everything.
Cade doesn’t want to be a revolutionary. He wanted to fix drill rigs and go home to Duluth. That option closed a long time ago. What’s left is the work in front of him: breach the blockade, get the full data to journalists who can’t be bought, and survive long enough for the truth to do what truth is supposed to do.
He knows the math on surviving. He’s been doing math like that his whole career.
Ignition is the concluding book of the Belt Wars trilogy.